I have a vivid memory from my newbie days bringing a Zep LP to a speaker demo and wondering aloud why the pair I was interested in had no bass. The store owner answered “because this recording has no deep bass” which surprised and shocked me. Then he put on a different recoding that actually had well recorded deep bass and I realized he was right.
Bad recordings and high end audio
Hello. Have decided that the kids are out of the house and I can dedicate some space and money to my long ignored hobby. What is different now is there are so few audio stores. I firmly believe in listening to products so thus I start this great new chapter of my life. The first 2 stores I went to the people were very patient with me and I listened to a ton of combinations. They asked me did I want to hear anything else and I said yes, ummm,.. how about Led Zeppelin? I received the same response from both stores which was “all Led Zeppelin recordings are horrible” except for this one version of Led Zeppelin 2…blah blah. So I said what happens if I am at home and i have a desire to play Led Zeppelin or another perceived poor recording? They did not have an answer for me nor did they play Led Zeppelin lol . I ended up ordering a pair of Magnepan 3.7i’s from a different store. 13 weeks until I get them, ouch. I am going to guess that people do listen to poor recordings on great systems because you just want to hear a particular album, right? Or am I missing something? Just looking for a bit of insight. Yes, I know they want it to sound the best so I will buy it but is that the only motivation. Or maybe they hate Led Zeppelin, lol.
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And that last comment by dodgealum1 is exactly right. In my earlier comment about comparing Radio head and def leppard recordings to led zep, I should have mentioned this: compare those recordings to "when the levee breaks". You know that the opening drum beat on this song should have kicked base ass. but it doesn’t. You know the deep base is there but no matter what you do, there is no way to pull it out as its just not on the recording. Even worse, when the harmonica and guitars kick in, the drum beat falls off even more. terrible, awfull, criminal recording engineering. Again, the greatest rock band of all time absolutely blew it on their recordings forever. what a colossal loss. |
There is an awful lot going on here that people are missing. Allow me to enlighten you. Recording: this is the master tape. People are saying a recording sounds this or that when all they know is how their copy of a record sounds on whatever they heard it on. This is the point of the Mike Lavigne story. That tape was right off the master. That Led Zep recording is a monster. Anyone saying otherwise should be clear what they are talking about. Bass: Led Zep does indeed have some low bass. It is just that back in the day the focus was recording the music. The music wasn't low frequency driven. The recording techniques were however perfectly capable of capturing what really low bass there was. So it is there, but the way they recorded it is not the way you remember from hearing it blasted over and over again on crap stereo. Tone controls: These are antithetical to high end audio. See above. It is tone controls more than anything else that created this false belief in how recordings sound. Tone controls don't work the way people think. They don't correct frequency response or make up for hearing. Every singer, every musical instrument has it's own characteristic fundamental tone. This fundamental tone is accompanied by a whole spectrum of upper harmonics called timbre. Tone controls wreak havoc on this relationship, destroying realism and the uniqueness of each instrument in the process. Tone controls are an abomination. Tone controls are however great for people with no real aspirations to achieve high fidelity sound quality. |
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