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How Many Of Us Are Compensating

No matter how elaborate, expensive or tweaked our systems get we are ultimately at the mercy of the sound quality of the music we purchase. The record producer, recording/mastering/duplicating engineers have set a hard limit on what can be retrieved from the recording media. Fortunately, the best recordings have a very high threshold as repeated equipment/set-up upgrades continue to discover additional levels of high fidelity sound. On the other hand, the average commercial recording can be quite pedestrian as far as sound quality goes. Over compressed, heavily EQ'd, non-existent soundstaging, etc... To what degree have you assembled your system and/or set it up in a way to compensate for the less than stellar sound quality of typical recordings? If you have "compensated", do you think what you did compromised the sound of the better made recordings?

As an example I have adjusted the toe-in of my speakers slightly more outward to avoid some objectionable upper midrange/lower treble hardness present on many modern recordings. Secondly, within the last year I've switched to a preamp with 7-band tone controls to deal with the really bad recordings.

BTW, I don't see compensating as a good or bad thing. I think it's far preferable to limiting what we listening to because it might not sound that good on our expensive toys.
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Showing 1 response by eweedhome

eweedhome
227 posts
 
Your comment about making compromises in our systems rather than limiting what we listen to is one that resonates very much with me. A year ago, I had a very analytical sounding system. On a select number of recordings, it sounded terrific. On a lot of recordings that mattered to me a great deal, it sounded painfully shrill (to my ear, anyway...to which many systems sound painfully shrill).

Today, there is nothing left of the system I had a year ago, although there sure were a lot of experiments and difficult choices in between (which others may have read about in some of my posts). I'm now sacrificing some air and detail in the highs, but I have a really nice mid-range to make up for it...I'm using Harbeth M30 speakers now, and all tube gear...and I can say that I'm getting more sensual pleasure now out of my system than any other time in the last roughly 7 years.
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