@audioman58
Thanks for pointing out how the Beatles albums were recorded, although I think many people who just joined the audiophile community in the past 20 years are unlikely to have those recordings, as it seems they are much younger than you or me. (I do have quite a few of the Beatles albums).
What I find missing from nearly any thread is the music someone uses to evaluate a cable- or a preamp or amp, for that matter. One can’t use any old recording and expect to hear "low level detail" (whose meaning the great majority are confused about).
As was the case in the 70s, 80s and 90s, reviewers listed the music they used, so the reader could then find their copy, play it and try to duplicate what the reviewer heard with that piece of equipment.
I saw a thread asking what is "transient response" and it is such an obvious thing to me, as someone who’s spent the last 60 years in symphony halls, the ballet, the opera, and clubs that were intimate enough for them not to use amplified sound. Obviously, one doesn’t listen "for" transient response while at the symphony, but when you hear the sound of massed violins playing pizzicato, you know what "transient response" is. I think the older audiophiles (meaning those of us over 50) have considerably more exposure to live (unamplified) music, given many of us had music requirements even in high school, so we heard live music whether we wanted to or not.
That might help the newcomers. It might also quiet those (but not likely) who claim that all cables sound alike, especially since so many have no acquaintance with the sound of live music, unless it’s amplified at a noisy concert (like the Beatles in Shea Stadium), which is most certainly not going to provide an inkling of low level detail.
TAS used to have a vocabulary of terms (e.g. "midbass," "soundstage," "imaging,"
"airiness," "bloom, " etc. What do people nowadays have? Not much. And when. there’s no definition of a word, people will fill in the blanks. It would be great if we could get back to a common vocabulary, but I have to say, with the attention span of people being shorter than the tail of a Boxer, I’m not sure they’d even want to learn.
