Does it have to sound good for you to like it?


I listen mainly to classical music.  The SQ of classical recordings is all over the place, not nearly as consistent other types of music.  Recording large orchestras is a complicated and difficult endeavor. Smaller ensembles are easier to record. So, if you listen to a great performance of an orchestral (or any) recording but have trouble with the sound will you avoid listening to it?

rvpiano

Showing 3 responses by immatthewj

Besides, that's when true audiophile rig shows real class - when it achieves an impossible task of making poor recordings sound tolerable.

Actually, @inna  , what my experience has been is that the better my system became, the less tolerable poor recordings/ masterings became.  Perhaps we are defining the word "better" differently.  

If it is bad enough I cannot listen for very long.

However, last night, in the course of auditioning/breaking in a pair of new speakers I started with Witches Bew (the Living Stereo 24 bit disc, NOT the SACD) and it sounded pretty good to me (and I am not a really a fan of classical, which may say something about the speakers). While that disc was playing, the desire to hear Lou Reed sing Sweet Jane came over me (". . . those were different times . . .") so I put on Rock And Roll Animal. The quality of that is on the rough side, but for the reasons @mrdecibel frequently cites, I got into it. However, with that last sentence typed, I probably wouldn’t want to listen to too many hours in a row with that quality.

I used to listen to poorer quality recordings when my gear was in the living room and I would be doing other things while jamming out and not paying as much attention to detail. After I moved to a smaller dedicated room there are no distractions but that has a price. For me, anyway, it does.

We take turns meeting at each member’s home, allowing each member to host and present/share their music, food, wine/drinks and good company. Most of the members have various consumer-level listening stations: AV receivers, Bluetooth soundbars and even the TV!

@audiodidact  , this KIND OF (remember, I did type "kind of") reminds me of when I was in the Air Force in the late '70s through early '80s.  Most of us had rack systems and some had better systems than that, and when I lived in the barracks (which I assume was a lot like a college dorm) a bunch of us would get together in someone's room and we'd play LPs and 8 tracks and drink beer.  Then in the early '80s my rack system and I moved off base to an apartment with a couple of other guys and people would come over and we'd drink beer and use cannabis products and whatever else might be around at the time and play LPs and 8 tracks or one of the local FM rock stations and turn on the TV with the sound down.  A friend of mine had what we considered at the time a pretty good system--Bose 901s and some huge Japanese watts in front of them. He had a great LP collection, and I remember an outdoor keg party he had at the little house where he was living and I got to play DJ and it was a great party and I had a blast picking the tunes and spinning the LPs..

In retrospect, I am positive the sound was not very good back then, but I also remember having a lot of pure fun with the MUSIC.  Way more pure fun than I have now with far superior gear and SQ.  But that was a long time ago, long before I had ever heard of critical listening, and if I wasn't listening the way I am listening now-a-days, I probably wouldn't be listening to anything, except maybe the radio in my pickup when I was driving some place.