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Making peace

Paul's Posts — 29 January 2012

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Making peace

Many of you are familiar with the Audiophile’s dilemma: well recorded music sounds better on a high-end system and poorly recorded music sounds worse.

It’s the problem of extremes: a high-end system extends the extremes – better sounds better, worse sounds worse.

The problem with this lack of homogenizing is we tend to restrict what we listen to and from a musical enjoyment standpoint that’s not ideal and really limits our enjoyment of the musical library – a problem made worse by having a music server setup where the world of music is available at your fingertips.

I know this may sound obvious to some of you, but here’s what I’ve figured out so I can have both.  Because I simply cannot bring myself to sit and seriously listen to a bad recording, I just take the “serious” out of the listening and am happy.  That means when I go to play a group of tracks they are chosen either as background music or as serious music.  If I want a listening session, I choose only recordings that make the system sing.  If I just want music, it’s in the background and that’s just peachy.

For me it solves a longtime dilemma and I am enjoying it more.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(13) Readers Comments

  1. January 29, 2012 at 2:44 am

    That seems as a nice compromise, if it works for you.
    For me, I just cannot stand background music….
    :-(
    If there is a conversation with music playing at a low level and I like the music, I will focus on the music and will loosing the conversation.
    But love to listen to even bad recorded material, as long as the music is nice….

  2. Gordon

    January 29, 2012 at 5:52 am

    Sure, a lot of us are changing our listening habits and the “juke box” convenience of Computer Audio is giving new focus to hard core audiophiles.
    They can now shift their attention and mania from cleaning and playing their vinyl, cleaning and playing a complete cd and tweaking their equipment …….

    NOW they can shift from maximizing sound quality to managing and burning their library, constantly ammending meta data, filling the whole house with multi-room music and ……

    This hobby invilves a certain compulsion to constantly “TWEAK” something and to do it in conjunction with “listening to enjoyable “hi-fi sounding music.
    The “compulsion” part is what defines an Audiophile from a casual listener.

    Is this trend healthy for the high end industry???

    Will convenience outweigh the “quality” attribute of Audiophilia???

    I believe the answer to this lies in the hands of the “music” suppliers.
    The quality of source material must continue to evolve and be “conveniently” accessible or Audiophilia as we know it today is doomed.

  3. January 29, 2012 at 7:30 am

    For a classical music listener, there may be no option. I have a lot of mono recordings and re-released live recordings from the likes of Kleiber, Furtwangler, assorted pianists, et al, that sound like crap. But I couldn’t live without those performances…

  4. sbrinck

    January 29, 2012 at 10:47 am

    I would give my server credit for for opening a world of recordings that I would never had been exposed to .The sampling aspect alone has made finding a great recording much more enjoyable and much less time consuming then it use to be . I have casually listen to music as Paul puts it and then went on a quest to find it in the highest quality available . I would even go so far as to say that some recordings lend them selves better to a PC then their CD or LP equivalent. I best stop now I am beginning to scare myself !

  5. January 29, 2012 at 10:48 am

    You don’t have to give up on bad recordings if you are willing to alter their sound, often drastically. I seriously listen to a lot of terrible sounding recordings in my collection that I make really enjoyable by adding EQ and my high frequency reverberation. Generally bad recordings are very screechy and require attenuation in the 3 kHz region in the range of 5 to 10 dB. Bass bosst at 15 Hz varies from 10 to 35 dB. I hate the sound of these recordings without processing. If I did not have this capability I would just throw them out. http://www.burwenbobcat.com

    • January 30, 2012 at 10:38 pm

      Thanks Dick – not all of us have such a cool way to EQ the sound. Love what you’re doing.

  6. Soundminded

    January 29, 2012 at 2:11 pm

    What is a good recording? From the producer’s point of view one that sells well. From the collector’s point of view one they enjoy listening to again and again. For what I call manufactured music which bears no resemblance to what was heard at the recording session there is no standard, anything may be good or bad. This is mostly various genres of pop, rock, etc. But for what I call documented music accuracy as measured by what listeners imagine they could experience live is the benchmark. This is usually classical music and jazz. With no standard way to make a recording and so many variables in the process is it any wonder what sounds like a good recording on one sound system may sound awful on another? In an earlier era when studios checked the FR of their monitoring systems used to make critical balance adjustments there was some degree of uniformity. This was done using calibrated microphones, sweep generators, spectrum analyzers sometimes as often as weekly. But today in the era of the audiophile/recording engineer it’s total chaos. I don’t think monitoring systems are equalized most of the time. Entirely different monitoring systems to produce recordings, entirely different playback systems to listen to them on, and with the removal of all effective means to adjust the playback systems to accommodate differences the buyer is stuck with whatever comes out. An entire cottage industry promising a fix including all sorts of crazy wires, sound absorbing panels, and other after-market items sold at sometimes exorbitant prices promise a sure fix. How could it possibly work.

  7. Rob

    January 29, 2012 at 7:20 pm

    I have plenty of poor recordings, vinyl and cds, I often go to a hi fi shop with music I like to listen to regardless of the recording quality because I want to listen to this music on new or better gear than mine. A concern I always seem to meet is the person doing the demo generally flicks on a great recording of music or an artist that I would never listen myself so they can demonstrate how good their system sounds with a great recording.Thats ok, but I generally never hear what my favourite music sounds like on some really good gear because of deaf sales people.

  8. avrij

    January 30, 2012 at 7:42 am

    I as you and countless others, have the same experience. its particularly bad with vinyl. my original ipod from the first generation has all my old napster downloads and is used for that break from serious listening, particularly in the morning bawthroom get ready for work time, put it on shuffle and let her fly.

    finding those well recorded albums is a hunt, new to me over the last 10 yrs. i recommend shelby lynns covers album. just spectacular show off material.

  9. Mike48

    January 30, 2012 at 11:46 am

    Paul, another interesting topic. I don’t know how you come up with one every day!

    As a listener mostly to classical & jazz, the performance is most important do me; the sound, second. But like anyone with a good stereo, I prefer good-sounding recordings. I rarely listen to background music — I find it too distracting.

    I agree with Dick Burwen that poor recordings often can be made much more enjoyable through equalization. Some things can’t be corrected with EQ, of course: image placement is one, and a second is overcompression, in which dynamics have been discarded in mastering. But all in all, I have found many excellent performances much more enjoyable after judicious use of EQ to remove, e.g., known mic FR peaks in the upper frequencies.

    We are still in the early days of DSP in high-end sound reproduction, and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. It seems possible that not only frequency response, but other characteristics of poor recordings could be made more natural. The audiophile (unlike the home-theater enthusiast) has been resistant to such approaches, but I would hope that, when they are done with high-end quality, they will become more widely appreciated.

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