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  3. 147787-77695

Doncha get bummed?

We put a lot of time, effort, and money into getting really nice systems.

And then we have to deal with crummy recordings made by inept engineers.

Yes, many of the older recordings suffer from being from the early days of stereo, but I've gotten a couple of recent recordings that are really bad.  One even had miscellaneous noises (like scraping chairs and ruffling music pages) at the ends on numbers that weren't even edited out.  Poor mic placement resulting in bloated bass.  Bad microphone choice on the piano making it sound muffled.  These are all well-reviewed recordings, too.  Huh?

Piano in the middle with no width or depth.  Bass out of the right speaker, drums out of the left.  Ho hum.

And microphone choices for female vocals!  Terrible more often than excellent.  Veiled, compressed, metallic.  Blecch.  Sucks the testosterone right out of me.

I have one relatively recent recording where the drums are clipped in every track.  Clipped.  Awful-sounding.

If it weren't for Manfred Eicher at ECM I'd probably shoot myself.

Bums me out.  Maybe I'll go back to a Japanese transistor radio from the 60s.
bbarlow690

Showing 1 response by folkfreak

folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak
1,349 posts
 
I suggest you stop listening to the recording and start paying attention to the performance. Also learn to embrace the faults and humanity in the discs -- I love squeaks, ticks and scraping chairs -- they mean that there were real human beings in a real room making the music! I've got discs were there's a clock ticking in the background that you hear as the level fades down, Ive got discs with creaking floorboards and A/C pumping away -- it's all part of what makes you hear the room in which the artists were present

A quality system will without exception allow you to engage with the performance irrespective of the recording. I cannot number how many CDs and LPs that I had given up as irredeemably bad recordings, nigh unlistenable that now yield new pleasures as my system now digs into murky and bloated recordings and unveils the real artistic intent below

The same is true of the wealth of mono recordings from before stereo which also have so much to offer

There’s something dreadfully wrong with any system that can only play the most pristine/audiofool approved of recordings
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