mystery muffled mids


I have a year-old setup I enjoy very much. B&W D3 805s and Hegel H590. Sound is really great. Imagining fantastic. every second with it is pleasure until I try to play classic rock. Anything by Led Zeppelin sounds like someone has smushed the sound and it lost the mid range, imagining disappears. I tried playing louder but live with too many people around to be able to do that constantly. And it did not improve anything noticably. 
I normally stream from Tidal via Audirvana. Anything by Bill Frisell, for instance, sounds phenomenal. You feel you can grab the instrument from the air. I mention this since he uses similar instruments to Zeppelin. Bowie's stuff sounds awful, as does Queen. I know they should sound better. Kind of Blue is fantastic. Gaucho, Sea Change, Elephunk, Wildfloflowers, Know what I mean? -- all great. To a friend, I said that this means bad recordings sound bad. The friend said that's not it. what do you say? How can I improve the sound? thank you in advance.
petar3

Showing 1 response by petg60

@petar3,I think that one answer is to try streaming from another source. Second one would be to try the vinyl and cd versions. Third would be the different versions of both. Somewhere there should be the ones you are looking for. Some search is required but the effort is a worthwhile attempt.
Not all rock bands in the classic period had the best in sound quality, you can discover this even having the original releases, and also there was a good amount of variation in sound quality even though some artists shared the same label. I am not including pressing variations in vinyl to save space.
Better Records as MC suggests, maybe.
But the music and the atmosphere should be right there. Coming back to artists you mentioned, i never found a thin Deep Purple recording (up to Gillan) but only a German compilation done from digital.
And i never found a good Queen II, only respectable on some songs in the original UK release. Sabbath was good to very good (Vertigo). Bowie good to very good (RCA Victor). But i have some Bowie Japanese pressings that are excellent. So it is not that everything will sound perfect but at some point being able to see what the performers are doing and how all this makes a wonderful musical sense.
I do not find generally Led Zep recordings bad, some on the contrary are excellent, but if you like check the BBC sessions for something better of their early period.