[Larkston Zinaspic]

It seems that a lot music that I like is hard to listen to on my system. The trebles and mids often sound strident, and nothing sounds balanced or natural. There are some exceptions, and some recordings are more tolerable than others, but the vast majority of stuff I hear sounds "tweaked-out" to me. Even a lot of the MoFi stuff. At first I thought my system must be the culprit, but now I'm unsure.

I have to admit, I don't have much in the way of "audiophile" recordings, but I just borrowed a demo disk from a friend. It's a double CD by Delos called Surround Spectacular. This disc sounds radically different: very smooth, very clear, not "digital" sounding at all, with great mass and depth in the basses. Perhaps they're not perfect, but they do sound excellent, compared to the other stuff. John Eargle was the engineer on these recordings, and it certainly gives me a different perspective about the way digital recordings should sound, even if it is a bit dated.

Anyone have an opinion about what I'm experiencing here?

[Tyson]

What's the point of having a "good" system if you can't listen to the music you enjoy.  I'd say the first thing to do is to treat your room, which will reduce the hard sound you are talking about quite a bit.

Next, what equipment are you using?

[SWG255]

Hi,

There are many reasons why "classic rock" recordings sound strident. Often, they suffer from problems with the recording studios and recording processes which began to take over recording studios and mastering studios in the late-60's and early-70's. Before this timeframe, vacuum tubes were the norm in mixing consoles and even high-end microphones for classical and jazz recordings. With the emergence of much popular music of the time, meant to be played back on inexpensive transistor radios and cheap home stereos, the use of solid-state mixing consoles, and the new solid-state powered condenser microphones began to arrive on the scene. Coupled with that were a spate of recording and mixdown techniques which often resulted in fairly high amounts of distortion on the master and mixdown tapes. Thus, a great many of recordings from this era sound strident and just plain "dirty". The more revealing a system, the more likely these flaws will become apparent to the listener.

Remember too that many "audiophile" systems of the time had a rather "soft" and forgiving sound. here I'm thinking of AR speakers driven with Dynaco ST-70 tube amps and PAS-3 tube preamps. phono cartridges of the period often didn't have the transient response characteristics of more modern designs, even designs that came along in the mid-70's had substantially more high-frequency detail than phono cartridges typically used around 1968-1970.

CDs made from these recordings, especially those made for "best of" collections in the 80's don't really make an effort to improve on the bad sound, and even bring out the worst characteristics of that sound because the mastering engineers still hadn't learned that CD is a different beast than LP, and many of the ways CDs are mastered now were being learned then.

The reference to MFSL CDs is also interesting. Often these recordings present the music from a 2-channel mixdown tape, worts and all. i sometimes question whether MFSL was really permitted to get to the earliest generation of the "master tapes", and even if they were, often these masters weren't all that clean.

To put it succinctly, I wouldn't voice my system strictly on the basis of these recordings, unless my listening was comprised of 80% or more to these recordings.

 

It seems that a lot music that I like is hard to listen to on my system. The trebles and mids often sound strident, and nothing sounds balanced or natural. There are some exceptions, and some recordings are more tolerable than others, but the vast majority of stuff I hear sounds "tweaked-out" to me. Even a lot of the MoFi stuff. At first I thought my system must be the culprit, but now I'm unsure.

I have to admit, I don't have much in the way of "audiophile" recordings, but I just borrowed a demo disk fr ...

[Whitese]

Well, besides the technology, I dont think a lot of the engineers where up to the task of making great sounding music....fe: YES with Eddie Offord...the firs few Yes albums sound clean and crisp, very fresh, and as they got more succesful and music got complicated and layered, and he got further stoned, the sound suffered enormously..I dont think that in the 70's recordings were engineered well. There are exceptions probably. Mike Oldfield stuff was good..Genesis was spotty,,,,King Crimson was always good...ELP, because of not too much competition for freq range (only 3 guys) usually sounded good.
But in the rush to get all this catalogue into CD's, i think it all sounded pretty bad,,early CD technology overall/

If you listen to current remasters, especially the japanese remasters, they sound incredible....I guess more care is taken now to be a little  more audiophillic.

[pretzel_logic]

Listen to them on vinyl.  I got out of vinyl for the most part years ago and went the CD route, never again.  Unless you have thousands upon thousands of dollars to throw at top end SACD you will never hear what decent rock on vinyl sounds like.  Some CD sound good but most decent vinyl beats them hands down.

Brian