When I first purchased my T1s, I was playing 2-channel music via my Oppo 103D analog outs into my Integra receiver. I was blown away with just how good the T1s sounded. Since that time, I have upgraded my pre-amp, amplifiers, and room acoustics. With every upgrade, quality recordings have sounded better. On the flip side, poor quality recordings have only gotten worse.

With my set up now, there is nowhere for bad recordings to hide. Any deficiency in the recording is clearly audible and the "hearing things in recordings I've never heard before" takes on new meaning. So, can a system be too unforgiving? Mind you, the good recordings sound better than ever and I don't find my system to be clinical or sterile. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and feedback.

Cheers,

T Cobe

Dear T. Cobe,
That is a great question you are posting for discussion..
Course, you sorta answered some of it yourself when you said your system is NOT clinical or sterile sounding!!!!
IF a system becomes clinical or sterile, dry and etched highs, etc. then YES that system could easily be called "too unforgiving".
And I have heard some systems sound like that, KRELL always sounds like this to me, always.
Speakers with metal dome tweeters often sound like that to me.
BUT here is the ultimate question in my terminology, systems can be VERY resolving of detail, and the truth is, some recordings are not that great sounding, we should be able to hear that, but is it "MUSICAL"?
I have some CDs that are not that great, are pretty harsh sounding, and I can hear that, but in nearly every case, they still sound musical. The ones that don't are not in my roto, get no playing time now.
My T 2s are very resolving, very revealing, but ALWAYS musical to the max!!!!! OK, I will admit that having some tubes in my system MAY help that out a little bit. And I am running silver interconnects and silver speaker wires.
I appreciate these kinds of discussions, hope this helps.
God Bless,
Wayne

T Cobe wrote: When I first purchased my T1s, I was playing 2-channel music via my Oppo 103D analog outs into my Integra receiver. I was blown away with just how good the T1s sounded. Since that time, I have upgraded my pre-amp, amplifiers, and room acoustics. With every upgrade, quality recordings have sounded better. On the flip side, poor quality recordings have only gotten worse.

With my set up now, there is nowhere for bad recordings to hide. Any deficiency in the recording is clearly audible and the "hearing things in recordings I've never heard before" takes on new meaning. So, can a system be too unforgiving? Mind you, the good recordings sound better than ever and I don't find my system to be clinical or sterile. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and feedback.

Cheers,

T Cobe

Hi, T Cobe

I think you're asking the right question, with the right criteria.... has the music gotten too clinical, unforgiving in the pursuit of clarity, detail?

I would say I am about where you are.... good quality recordings have just plain gotten better, and the musicality is still there, in fact even more so on the GOOD stuff. What I AM finding, is that having heard just how exquisitely beautiful well recorded music can sound, my search for new music has taken on more SQ editing (I have stopped using SPOTIFY/MP3 streaming and use DEEZER FLAC sourced streamed music, my taste for DTS HD MA quality surround music has gotten more pronounced, I find that some older CD's I used to listen to just don't sound as good relatively speaking as quality recordings).

I'm still at the point where I gladly trade off moving to a mix of better quality recordings in exchange for the AMAZING sound I am hearing, and I can still enjpy lots of (most?) of my older CD stuff.. It's just that the really good stuff can move me more than music has ever moved me before, and I just am not willing to give that up.

I think your instincts are right. As long as the direction is better clarity without giving up MUSICALITY, it can be a good thing. I find myself listening MORE than ever, and appreciating music more than ever.

Happy listening!

Rick

I find the recording and mastering quality to be a much bigger difference than format / resolution. This is easily testable by taking a Chesky or similar recording and make an iTunes high bitrate, but compressed rip of it. Its still going to sound very good. I'd bet real money that 95% of the people on this forum couldn't pass a blind test between it and the original high-resolution source. Conversely, if you could find a high-rez version of a crummy album (I don't know of this exists) its still going to sound bad. Case in point, again, I don't know if this album is sold on e.g. HD Tracks or not but one of the most offensively poorly mixed albums that I like is the most recent Imagine Dragons album. I like these songs but the compression and distortion on this album is unforgivably bad. If there's a 24/192 version of this album out there its still going to sound bad (unless its been remastered).

-Just my humble opinion.

By the way, I didn't intend to imply you can't hear the bad stuff, but just that usually its the recording / mastering, not whether its CD vs. SACD or DVD-A etc. Those formats sound good because they are recorded by engineers who care about audio quality, not because the format itself.

Thanks Imahawki,
I think your humble opinion is a very good one.
Another case in point for you, I love to listen to the RCA Living Stereo 3 channel recordings of the masters of classical music, many recorded from the 1950's. OK, I am admittedly listening on SACD DSD discs, so high resolution, but the recording equipment and processes of the 50's can hardly be up to today's best available. And yet the recordings, because they were done WELL and CAREFULLY, I would even dare say, LOVINGLY recorded and transferred, they sound AMAZING. Terrific. WAY better than a LOT of the pop music out there today.
Some of the difference being that what these RCA guys were recording was music for the ages, and a lot of today's music will hardly be playing 3 months from now. SORRY, my humble opinion.
However, where we might not agree, going the other way, taking a great recording and reducing it down to MP3 will make it much harder to appreciate all the musicality of that great recording.
Just my 2 cents worth, and why I guess I am gravitating totally away from modern pop music and more towards classical, or music that is at least recorded WELL.
God Bless,
Wayne