Do you trust your system?


I was constantly upgrading gear, demoing songs, reading reviews, trying to find out why I had the feeling that the song I was playing shouldn’t sound the way it does. Something off or lacking, I luckily found a set of equipment and a room setup that if a song is off, it’s likely recorded that way. I trust my system to do a decent job.  I wonder do others get to a point where they are more critical of mastering techniques than something wrong with their equipment? Admittedly, it’s easier to say how a piece of gear or cable made some significant difference, but in what exactly since the music sources are so wildly manipulated by engineers?

dain

Janis Joplin has always been a favorite, but finding a great recording including some 15ips RtR 2nd masters, sucked. It was better than what I had but it was just rougher than a cob.. They didn't dub anything they just recorded it. Good, bad, or wasted, it got recorded.. One recording I heard 5 zippo lighters slam shut through the recording.. 

Neurotic audiophiles scurry to hear if their system reproduces 5 zippo lighters.

I am wondering what question the OP is asking.  Of course I trust my system.  Different remasterings of recordings will sound different.  If his system is good enough to allow him to hear these differences, then it is doing the job

+2, @thyname 

I am now more focused on finding best possible recordings than worrying about equipment upgrades. 

There is NO system that sounds real...or is truth telling. All you can achieve is a reasonable, if that, facsimile of what was recorded. The only difference between one system to another is they all sound different. Like a dog chasing his tail or the proverbial merry go round. Just be happy your not listening to a boom box. Otherwise you will end up in the Nut house. Also, unless you were in the recording studio at the time the recording was layed down to tape, how are you supposed to know how it was intended to sound? You can’t....people are wasting a whole lot of money swapping and selling in an attempt to achieve what is not possible. Like a few say here, just enjoy the music, and buy more of it, meaning buy more physical media. Sorry, streaming is not for me, except to find or discover new music.

The recording of a significant amount of modern pop and rock music goes way beyond the use of relatively simple eqs, compression and reverb that would have been the staples of the signal chain in studios before the advent of computer based recording. The result is that a lot of modern pop/rock recordings do not sound great. That is is the fault of the use of the technology and not the technology itself, I should add as evidenced by the fact that there are many excellent computer based digital recordings of other musical genres such as classical and jazz. As far as I'm concerned, unless the recording is totally excreable, I'll listen whatever music I like regardless of the recording quality. I'don't subscribe to the theory that a revealing system makes bad recordings sound worse, rather that it makes it easier to hear "through" the recording to the music.