How competitive are you with your system?

The ability to compare one system to another is not a level playing field. If for no other reason, in this hobby, the room matters more than anything else,and no two rooms are alike.

Several years back I attended an audio demo wherein the system did sound excellent. The dealer asked the attendants how the system compared to real ’live’ music. Some folks came out and stated this system sounded better than live to their ears! 

I thought this reply was not correct and showed that those who made the point were perhaps not listening enough to live music, even though it was probably in the top 5% of systems I had heard. Now, if we took a canned version of this system and listened to it via video online, i believe that a few things would be evident. 1) the system would sound only a fraction as good as when heard live and 2) the ability to really determine its quality would be severely diminished. Therefore, personally i give very little credence to the SQ on videos on the web as to how any particular product or system sounds. 

@carlos269   this is the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlOhiTpZCek

And another even older vid..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRNfxQRTduA

My old system sounded a lot better in real life than these videos portrayed.

@carlos269    

so what says you of systems that sound exceptional and great on audio recordings embedded in videos?

Problem is that i have never heard a video that comes anywhere near close to what the sound of as system sounds like if one is in the room with it. IOW, no great or exceptional audio on videos. 

@carlos269  I don’t think the recording per se is the issue with listening on video. The problem is more likely due the reproduction equipment and what one is listening to it on. 

i have a fairly well liked video on YouTube from seven years ago with my Guarneri speakers playing Miles Davis…but while a lot of folks think it sounds really good, it pales in comparison to what it sounds like in my room.

@carlos269  I only offered the two old videos as example of what I feel is the reason why video over the web is not a good way to judge a system. In my examples, what cannot be heard, particularly in the Miles Davis track is the ability of the system to portray depth and also air. While my current system is far superior in all ways to the older versions, I know that the increase in depth portrayal, resolution ( which I greatly worked on) and soundstage definition would not be able to be picked up on a video, since it was not before. 

@mihorn   Sorry, but I do not hear depth or really image precision on your videos. Probably caused by the playback through my desktop system.