Many of my bootlegs of various artists. Jeff Beck, the Grateful Dead, the Who and Little Feat to name a few. Most are audience recordings made in the 70s. I attended most of the shows so the nostalgia is great but the sound is usually poor. Especially on my best system,
On a different note, share the artists you own that DON'T sound good
Use whatever parameters you pay attention to. Timbres, dynamics, clarity, imaging, soundstage, top-end, mids, bottom-end, etc.
In my collection, the artists that (usually) don't sound good are-
Faces
Rod Stewart
(early) Rolling Stones
(some) Ted Nugent
(some) Eric Clapton
(early) Aerosmith
(early) Beatles
(early) Credence
(early) Doobie Bros
(early) The Clash
Foghat
(early) The Who
(early) ZZ Top
(early) Led Zeppelin
Janice Joplin
I've probably overlooked some other stinkers in my collection
Thank God for talented remastering engineers!
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The "popier" you get the more over compressed it is likely to be. It has little to do with the recording equipment, since many of the best sounding recordings are all-tube efforts from the fifties and sixties, especially classical and jazz. The same kind of care was lost on the rock efforts, but that got better with time, and then digital hit and the "engineers" went crazy. Somewhere in there the audio obsessed kids from the early eras grew up and got better home equipment. They became audiophiles. So did some of the engineers, and they had a market, a new one, to satisfy. The ones producing teeny junk kept doing that but even they had to start making allowances for mid-fi equipment that was now getting much better. I see somewhere in there someone said Charley Patton was poorly recorded! All of this is relative. Most of us are listening for two things: the performance, and the sonics. God bless Thomas Edison, I say, who was nearly deaf. |
@howardlee "Most of us are listening for two things: the performance, and the sonics". Well said! Couldn't have said it better myself. |
I don't think certain artists sound bad. Or if they do, its a smaller list than you have. Bad sound for me is often the early cd's or digital recordings. I've noticed that as my system has gotten better, the list of bad sounding recordings has gotten smaller and smaller. Some that I couldn't listen to at one time are now in a normal rotation. AAMOF I have been impresed at how good some of the classic rock sounds. That said, Layla has always been on the bad sounding albums.Some Early Aerosmith may be there too, IE Toys in the Attic. Most of the others you list sound pretty good on my system. But then I play mostly vinyl which is another can of worms I didn't mean to open |
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