My good friend loves heavy rock guitar, screaming riffs from Prince or orgasmic mashups from classic Springsteen or Bowie. We'd jam those vinyls and CDs all night long. No problem. Then I moved in 1.7i Maggies into my rig. Whoa. What went wrong? Well, I AB'd with my old pair of DefTech 9080xs which do loud and deep bass like a Sunday afternoon stroll. We were rocking again. Then back to the Maggies (crossed over to a pair of 10" Martin Login subs). I heard EVERYTHING. And it sounded very different. Let's be honest, it sounded terrible. I turned to my friend and asked if maybe, it was how it was engineered/mixed? Like, tracks were really just thrown together, one track on top of another to maybe generate more power, more sound? He shrugged his shoulders and kept digging the music. Well, I thought so. I could hear it now. I was just left thinking for the first time that what I often think is good is really muddled, covered-up sound, with only a small percentage of what was mixed-recorded being revealed. Moving up to more resolving systems destroys that vail of ignorance to actually allow poorly mixed music to show itself. OTOH, well mixed rock (prog mostly...), is a revelation. I spun Days of Future Past and couldn't move until the dead wax broke my trance.
