Bad recordings and high end audio

I think these two songs are one of the best to demo a system.  They are also very high quality recordings.

1.  Nasty by Vincent Ingala
2.  Little Person by Michael Wollny

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.

@mikekollar, "Back in Black", a great Rock tune, is AC/DC....

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. 

I never was able to do much with tone controls. Although when I was a youngster I had a graphic equalizer and then a parametric equalizer I will now admit at 61 years old I had no idea what I was doing with them lol. I understood what you were saying with the master tape story. Thank you again Miller.