Is it me or new audio gear is too perfect and give ear fatigue?


Since getting back into the hobby during covid I’ve really enjoyed listening to music vs. bluetooth low quality speakers.  Since listening to my Nautilus 803 speakers with old Yamaha Amps (MX1, MX1000) they’ve been sweet sounding and warm.

A lot of people have said the new equipment is near perfect chasing specs, sounding bright and causing ear fatigue.

Curious if people feel the same?

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Showing 1 response by mulveling

It certainly is very easy these days to build systems that have way too much high frequency energy and/or is fatiguing. The two are correlated but not equivalent - SOME gear has a perceived excess of treble / HF energy, but is of such a very high quality (and so smooth) that it doesn’t cause me fatigue. Some examples: Stax headphones like the SR-009, Ortofon’s high-end MCs: A90 / Windfeld Ti. That’s not typical though. And you still don’t want to stack multiple components like this, because the result will be musically unbalanced.

This behavior is definitely not just driven by room acoustics - it’s characteristic of the components themselves. I hear the same sonic footprint when I move a component into a buddy’s system. And of course headphones (which I have tons of experience with) don’t have this variable at all.

System matching, to ensure a good resulting balance, is crucial. This isn’t something you can reasonably glean from FR graphs or other measurements. I don’t know of a way other than trial & error.