i've noticed there is a wide variety in sound quality from recording to recording, even those made in the same studio with the same people. a lot can go wrong between the studio and your listening room, at multiple steps along the way. some recording studios [particularly classical labels] try to ameliorate this situation by using consumer equipment in a consumer-type of studio listening room, to make their sound something that sounds more reasonable in a typical home listening environment. i have found that for most situations, a certain modest amount of dynamic range compression/limiting is helpful to make a given recording sound the best in the universe of different listening environments/equipment complements out there. there is an artful way of doing this which doesn't do [as much] dirt to the lucky owners of megabuck equipment and megabuck listening rooms. a light touch is required, but not all recording professionals have a light touch, as witnessed by the thousand and one sins one hears in commercial recordings. the biggest sin IMHO is mixing the vocals in a way that they are barely discernible from the musical background, i believe the germ of this idea came from hollywood movies with their emphasis on "realism" IOW maximizing the [relative] impact of the loud parts by reducing the volume/clarity of dialogue. a lot of artists don't care to have their vocals too high in the mix [Elvis was a notable example], and the engineers are all too happy to play along. i have [per audiological exam/spectrogram] normal hearing for my age, so when i hear muffled vocals listening on my Sennheiser HD580 cans, i know something is wrong with the recording.
Why Do Some Recordings Sound Great and Others Dead?
I listen to Radio Paradise MQA on my NODE 3, SMSL M400, B and O Beolab 8000’s and Hsu 15in sealed sub. The acoustics in my room are poor. I’ve noticed that some recordings sound very realistic. For instance the vocals on a Stabat Mater dolorosa hymn sounded great. But a Nora Jones recording was terrible. Her voice was lost in back of some murky instruments. I’m familiar with this recording listening to it on my iPod, where her voice shines out and the music is good. I’m wondering why the big differences?