So how can a great system solve less than great recordings

"Some of my best recordings are from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They knew how to record and master back then, today it is mostly a lost art and most remasters suck in my opinion."

How right you are Audioguy85!!

Me too, give me an original Decca or EMI pressing every time.

Today's problem is digital offers producers and engineers the opportunity to tinker.  They just can't resist it.  So in most cases everything that was good about the original recording is corrupted 'we need a bit of heightened this or toned down that'.

This applies equally to today's new recordings in which the digital desk is ever present under the hand of the engineer who loves to fiddle, thinking that such tech wisdom as he may have knows better than the musicians who created the performance.

JUST LEAVE IT ALONE.

A live performance (at least of acoustic instruments) doesn't contain any engineer corruption.  So, if you want to reproduce it accurately, dump the engineer, or at least tie his hands.

@audioguy85,


"Some of my best recordings are from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They knew how to record and master back then, today it is mostly a lost art and most remasters suck in my opinion."



Good points.

It had to be an art back then because of the huge number of variables involved.

All the way from different studios, microphones, mixing desks, tape decks, cutting lathes etc.

Year after year superficial reissues and remasters keep on coming with great fanfare but eventually the usual consensus settles on the originals being the best.

There's hardly ANY reissue today that doesn't suffer from some compression of dynamics. 

They just cannot help but tinker and as a result something valuable has often been lost.

How many times is it the case that the 'period feel' of the recording is the first thing to go.

Do we really want Caruso, Callas, Crosby, Sinatra etc to sound as if they were recorded yesterday?

Thank you very much but I want my music to sound the way it was intended to. As much as I admire the Vic Anesini Elvis remasters they don't sound sound like the Elvis I grew up with.

Close, but not quite.

So just how many reissues of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Doors, Dylan etc do we need before they actually deliver an actual all round definitive improvement? 

Until they actually do this, all that ANY system can do is to increasingly highlight this tinkering.

It's hardly surprising that so many music demos feature a carefully chosen but rather limited repertoire, is it?

Even worse, this tinkering is hardly ever designed for high performance audio systems.

Is it also any wonder that once the novelty has worn off that mounting disappointment gradually brings home the reality that so many of the 1980s CD transfers are still the best along with the original vinyl transfers?

Put simply, it's rather pointless to flog a dead horse.

The recordings matter more than the system, and the considerable  differences between them can only be magnified by better playback gear.

Sinatra recordings are quite good, beatles sadly not that great at times.  Kinda disappointing they didnt do better.  
My older system did better with beatles but the speaker cones decayed ........

revealing systems dont do well with highly mixed older tunes like the beatles.  

Thanks audiorusty,
I have always shied away from any signal processing. Even tone controls. I don't even have a separate phono stage using the one built in to my preamp. K.I.S.S.

jumia;

"It seems no matter how good a system is, the quality of recording quality takes priority".  

"Good" according to whom???? 

You can assume that the more resolving your system, the more it will reveal the differences between recordings and highlight both the good and the bad. 

You are the one who is going to be listening to your system and only you know which music is most important to you. There's little point in assembling a system that sounds sublime for genres you don't care about but is disappointing when it comes to what you really love. 

For example, I've found that DACs vary enormously in this regard.Some are so resolving that all sense of the "forest" is lost because each "tree" is artificially hyped. . .never mind each tree--  more like every vein on every  leaf!  A lot of people seem to really like this effect. I'm not one of them. Maybe you do, but if not, there are other ways to go. That's the double-edged sword of this  obsession... er, I meant, "hobby"-- there's a lot of gear to choose from. 

There are also trends in recording. In the 80's, it was "cool" to make drums sound like trash cans being pounded inside a cement bunker. 
Good luck making those sound good. Or maybe you like that... if so, I don't mean to insult you-- this was merely the first example that popped into my head. The fact is, whatever your tastes, you are bound to encounter CDs that do not please your ears, for one reason or another. Finally, "remastering" is not necessarily an improvement. Check out the Steve Hoffman Forums for discussion on the relative merits of different versions of any given CD.