While many good points have been made above, my feeling is that you hit upon the most significant reason in your original post. Recordings that are poorly engineered, or intentionally brightened, or both.
Most of my listening (80% vinyl, 20% cd) is to classical music on labels that are either audiophile-oriented, or are otherwise high quality. I hear very little that I would describe as harsh. When I have occasion to put on a popular recording, or many big-label classical releases, my reaction is often (although certainly not always) simply "ouch."
Regards,
-- Al |
I would argue that there is a good reason many people believe that the best sounding orchestral recordings, for one example, were those made in the 50's and early 60's with just a couple of mikes hung either far out into the hall or far above the orchestra, in the case of Mercury. There is very little mixing on these recordings in comparison to what happens today. My understanding is that a major reason for that, apart from general mediocrity and mis-indoctrination of many recording engineers and producers, is the very high cost per hour of employing a symphony orchestra or other large ensemble. It is, unfortunately for we audiophiles, simply a lot cheaper to record one take, using a forest of microphones, and "fix it in the mix," rather than to record with purist microphone techniques, and risk having to do multiple re-takes, or risk having to proceed with a product that has unacceptable musical or technical miscues. Those who listen almost exclusively to electronically produced music are not the ones generally complaining of harshness, in my experience. Rock concerts today are performed at insane volumes, with especially the bass greatly distorted by gigantic subwoofers, and many young people today think that all music is supposed to sound like that, and build systems to suit that taste. Many such people simply play their systems too loudly most of the time, trying to recreate this over-amplified sound. Most movie theaters do the same thing.
The greatly compressed MP3 files also are much brighter and harsher than other formats, and many young people are becoming used to this sound as well. Sad but all too true. The quality of reproduction of the music that most people listen to is clearly trending downward, given the ubiquitousness of mp3 players, compressed downloads, etc. Which gives producers and engineers correspondingly less incentive to issue high quality material. The saddest part, as you allude to, is that most young listeners are never exposed to, or given an awareness of, what is possible in high quality music reproduction, and so are not able to decide, on an informed basis, to what degree quality matters to them. Regards, -- Al |
I did not plug the TT-PSU into the conditioner when I tried it, just the other electronics. It still had a very negative effect on the sound when the turntable was the source. Learsfool -- It seems to me that the resulting isolation between the ac grounds of the turntable and the preamp could be the reason for the negative effects you noted. That could very conceivably result in voltage differentials between the grounds of the two components, which could cause noise currents to flow between them in the ground wire of the phono cable (which has a substantial impedance at ultrasonic frequencies due to its inductance), from where they might couple into the lines carrying the signals from the cartridge, and cause intermodulation products or other effects within the audible spectrum. I'm always leery about doing anything that would tend to isolate the ac grounds of components that are connected together with signal interconnects. Clearly it can be helpful in some systems, such as in cases where people have separate dedicated ac lines for the digital and the analog parts of the system, but it can also lead to problems with ground loops, voltage offsets between component chassis, and spurious noise currents flowing in interconnect shields or ground connections. Thanks for the good clarifications, also, on multi-miking, re-takes, etc. Regards, -- Al |
