I know you sometimes hear talk of recordings being designed so they sound good on car stereos and through the radio on **** equipment, but I never really thought much about it. But today I listened to some old music of mine that I never really thought much of in terms of it's balanced sonic character (but listened to it a lot due to it's affinity), as in I never thought it was very well balanced - this is music dating back to the 90's & 80's when I didn't have a decent setup - listened to it now through Harman EQ'd headphones (HD560s) and I was surprised at how well balanced it was through the frequency range, which I never had that impression before. Soul Mining from the band The The is what triggered this thread post. I always thought sonically that it was lacking back in the 90's (and even around 5yrs ago when I was listening to it on **** ipods), but now listening to it on full range gear that can reproduce 20Hz-20kHz faithfully then it came alive from a purely sonic perspective in terms of balance. I suppose what I'm saying is that some music seems to be recorded to sound good on "rubbish" non-full range gear, but there are some musical gems out there that come alive when played on truly anechoic flat full range gear, which might otherwise sound subdued or uninteresting on "standard" gear. I'm not sure this is worthy of a thread, but I wanted to relay my thoughts. The example of Soul Mining from The The is not a particularly hard to play track in terms of significant low reach bass, although I'm sure there is some (I've not analysed it spectrally), but it contrasts with my experience of the same music on lesser systems in the past where sonically I thought it had been lacking, but seems like it was recorded to be optimised for full range/balanced systems.
With this in mind, what music have you found that really only sounds right on "full range (high fidelity) gear"? Might be interesting for folks who have written off previous older recordings of bands they weren't exposed to before they got some decent gear??
With this in mind, what music have you found that really only sounds right on "full range (high fidelity) gear"? Might be interesting for folks who have written off previous older recordings of bands they weren't exposed to before they got some decent gear??
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