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 pbb

Quite the opposite, I find that most audiophiles have systems tailored to play the four or five perfect albums ever recorded.

There is nothing wrong with EQ or tone controls if you need them.

A lot of great music is found on recordings with less than stellar recording qualities. If a person is of the music-first type, they don't even bother with the equipment that much.

The one thing I would love is a vacuum SOTA table with a light arm and high compliance cartridge to play all the records with edge warp, slight or radical, that I have.

I find that many records have sibilance issues and I have put up absorptive panels on the ceiling at the points of first reflection.