> If all the cd's you pick sound that bad, I'd suggest > reconsidering the music you purchase :P
OK, so we can all crank up the passive-aggressive stanza here. That wasn't my point. My point is that a lot of recordings are not engineered for audiophile listening. When you hear writers in the mags go on about staging and resolution - go listen to most recording, where no heed was payed to any of that. There was no "stage" used because it's all canned. They'll mix some more quitar in the right channel here, the drums in the left, and will move the phase around a tad. But it's all artificial. There is no stage in most music. If it's just about the war of the frequencies, heck, pretty decent range and reproduction can be achieved with decent -but cheap- speakers and oh horror, a subwoofer these days. 16Hz to 24KHz for less than $1k, many a car stereo upgrade proves that. :-) The way this argument has evolved is kind of funny: audiophiles lambasting each other about whether FLAC or MP3 is "better", when in fact music can sound wonderful on good compact cassette tape recorders. Even the most rabid audiophile engages in a pathetic compromise right away in listening to canned music itself, instead of listening to it live. The purest musical experience is often compromised and flawed. The biggest obstacle is really ourselves. The technology we have at our disposition is pretty damn awesome these days, and a great musical experience does not require a big expense. My first 256MB player playing 128Mbps WMAs through upgraded headphones probably provided a purer audiophile reproduction than my dad's upscale HiFi system did in say, 1979, when I fell in love with George Benson's "love times love" and was enthralled by the purity of the background vocals. That's one recording I can listen to these days on CD through my $7k Accuphase DP-65v, a lossless FLAC or via a 128Mpbs WMA feed through the SQB, and it does most likely not matter one yota. The quality may be slightly better off the CD, sure, but the key aspect is that I listen to it and go "hell yeah!", still. It sounds fantastic no matter what. Then there's the *ritual* of putting the CD into the player, say with a recording like Coltrane & Hartmann's "This is my beloved", and that's when I sometimes want to close my eyes, breathe in every vibration and sound, and am glad I am able to express my worship to such music clumsily with my audiophile shrine. But the gating factor is the emotion - the gear itself and the sound quality has long stopped being a factor in my case. Whatever I play through whatever medium in my home system is going to sound pretty fantastic, and has for a while. The audiophile shrine... part of psychoacoustics, as well. -- pablolie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pablolie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3816 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21173 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
