There are lots of things you can do to improve sound systems andimprove room acoustics but there is also something that unfortunately you can't fix. A bad engineered recording is simply a bad recording.....
I can't say for sure, of course, that this is your issue but so many sound engineers are over equalizing their recordings. It seemed to start in the 80s with the sudden popularity of boombox style stereos. The effect of loudness was king on a recording at the expense of accuracy. The sad fact is that when you invest in truly accurate sound equipment, it not only makes awesome recordings more awesome but it also presents to you the realities of poor recordings that you might not have heard before. On less accurate systems like Big Box store speakers and MP3 players, the sound is not being produced accurately so it is more 'forgiving' to poor recordings. This creates the irony that many CDs actually sound better on lower end sound equipment than they do on audiophile gear. Same with MP3s. You may find that your compressed music that used to sound great on your MP3 player, now sounds crappy on your expensive speakers. Kind of a conundrum because you can now hear what is not there. I'm no audiophile, golden ear myself but here are two CDs I use to demonstrate this which will be obvious to anyone.. Evanesence - Fallen Dire Straights - Brothers in Arms. Play both CDs on an average sound system or MP3 player. Odds are that Dire Straights will sound a bit better, because it is. It is one of the better engineered CDs out there. Evanescence will still sound very good. The cutting edge vocals blast into your ears as do the hard hitting riffs. Both have very dramatic sounds in many songs. That's why I chose them. Now, if you have access to such, play both on a much more accurate system. Doesn't have to be in the 10s of thousands of dollars range. Just speakers know for their 'proven' accuracy and flat frequency response. Now if the speakers are set up well, Brothers in Arms suddenly becomes simply amazing. You don't just hear clarity in stereo but a whole virtual sound stage opens around you. You hear notes and noises you didn't even know existed in the music. Play Evanescence and very quickly, disappointment sets in. Amy Lee's powerful vocals should be stunning but they are not. They are blandly mixed in with the rest of the instrument noises. What should be emotional peaks in the music now all sound the same. It's like every sound is blended together at exactly the same level...... because it is. You turn it louder to make it sound better but it just leads to more disappointment. If you turned them into MP3s, it gets even worse. Highs become lost or tinny, lows become feint or fuzzy. Being able to concentrate on any particular instrument that is not forefront becomes difficult. Anyways, my apologies for the long rant. I'm not disagreeing with the other posters at all, just taking this opportunity to flame sound engineers who fell into the 'loudness' trap and are making recordings that punish those of us who are able to hear how they truly recorded it. It might also explain why your more 'neutral' speakers are making this CD sound worse than the speakers your higher end speakers. -- Murph ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Murph's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10553 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=37313 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
