16 bit files almost unlistenable now...

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, semente said:

Yes.

So my question is whether we (you and I) have different standards and expectations from Frank's and he doesn't mind that bad recordings sound bad as long as the sound coming out of his right is effortless or his system is so coloured that bad recordings actually sound reasonable because his rig masks the problems.

That's what I am wondering. It is a physical impossibility for a system to be at once incredibly detailed and transparent and also, simultaneously, mask the awfulness of terrible sounding recordings. Those are two diametrically opposed concepts! There is suspicion among a number of us here on CA that most of what Frank says he is hearing is in his head anyway, and if so, there is no physical explanation as to why Frank hears the unlikely things that he brags that he is hearing, But assuming he has a system that does indeed make lousy recordings sound like the best recordings, we have to assume that since we cannot raise the quality of the bad to equal the great, Frank's system must be reducing the quality of the best recordings to sound as lousy as the bad recordings. Maybe it's a combination of reducing everything to the quality of the lowest common denominator and his imagination provides the quality of reproduction that he endlessly brags about. To me that sounds like an explanation that covers all the contradictions in Frank's postings.

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

George, I've said it from the get go ... I said, my motto is "There's no such thing as a bad recording!" - if you look really closely at this sentence you may possibly notice the phrase "my motto is", NOT "I believe".

 

The better the playback is, the more chance that the ear/brain can unravel what it's hearing, and discard, unconsciously, distortion which is not relevant to the musical message. In the best circumstances this inner processing fully forms an illusion, even for "poor" recordings - the presentation is convincing.

 

What a competent rig does is make many 'audiophile' recordings sound bland, boring - they are so lacking in texture and interest that you wonder why you bothered putting them on. Fot those without that tag, every recording opens a different world - they sound completely different, from one to the next.

 

 

What my method does is make the rig "invisible" - all you hear is the recording. And all my method is, is to identify flaws in the sound, and resolve the cause of those flaws - pretty damn simple, if you think about it a bit ... .

More complete and utter nonsense from Frank. 

 

[gmgraves]

2 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

Does it also explain his ability to listen to music with the amp cranked as loud as it will go without going deaf?

It must!

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

What a competent rig does is make many 'audiophile' recordings sound bland, boring - they are so lacking in texture and interest that you wonder why you bothered putting them on. Fot those without that tag, every recording opens a different world - they sound completely different, from one to the next.

There it is! my suspicions confirmed. Frank's notions of a "competent rig" is one that homogenizes everything. bad recordings sound ok and and audiophile recordings "sound bland and boring." He has confirmed that his system makes everything sound the same. Wow, after all these months. There's an old Japanese saying about conformity: "the nail that sticks up must be hammered down." The recording that stands above the mediocre and the incompetent must be reduced to the "bland and the boring."

[gmgraves]

3 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Gosh, you're a silly bugger, George! ...

 

"Detailed and transparent" is what's needed to reveal everything in the recording - most audiophile rigs then contaminate that playback with disturbing, low-level artifacts, which are not part of the recording - if one eliminates the latter then one has the best chance of hearing the recording present its best face, and IME that's good enough for the mind to hear past the recording issues. At least some 'audiophile" efforts are recorded in an as sterile manner as possible, because they rely on the typical audiophile rig to add the necessary 'seasoning'; to 'spice' it up a bit ... you read reports on how these recording show so many sides ... ummm, they're showing the side of the particular playback rigs 'colouring; of the track - the "additive of the day" ...

You and I have a totally different idea about what is transparent in a playback system. That's all I can say!

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

I have pointed to so many recordings, in numerous posts, which tell me various things about a rig's capabilities - does your setup "handle" all of them with ease - or not?

 A lot of the stuff that you have pointed out, I wouldn't listen too and don't care how they sound. On the other hand, my system is very revealing; It tells the truth good or bad. And that's what I want. I don't want a system that pulls everything down to the lowest common denominator making all recordings, good and bad sound the same. Just not interested. 

 

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, diecaster said:

@gmgraves

 

Just ignore him. That’s what I do. Well, that’s not quite true...I read his posts and laugh. Responding is a waste of time. 

It is a waste of time, but I enjoy catching Frank in his back-pedaling from some of his outrageous and obviously ignorant statements, I enjoy the way he dodges all criticism by completely ignoring it, and how, in spite of a hail of derision, he keeps on bragging about a system that is obviously so poor that it makes all recordings sound the same. But that's OK, right? Because Frank's system is really in his head. It's amusing and entertaining to spar with him. And he never fails to rise to the bait.  

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, Hugo9000 said:

Does he actually have a system?  His profile says it's "in limbo" and he said a few posts back that his DAC is whatever is in his laptop.  Not that there is anything wrong with using a laptop and some earbuds if that's all one can afford, but people in such a position rarely make it their occupation to post thousands of times a year on audio forums lecturing everyone else about quality playback.  (Edited to add:  Now that I think of it, I'm probably wrong on this last point, as I recall some of the people on r/audiophile hahahaha!)

That's right it does say "in limbo". So whether he is currently between systems or doesn't actually have a system, I'm wondering if perhaps he isn't some kind of troll. He posts so much and says so little that I often wonder if he's not really just pulling our collective chains. There's no way to know, though, is there?

[gmgraves]

17 hours ago, Hugo9000 said:

Looking at my post above, where I mocked RCA and Magnavox boomboxes and various cheap rack systems of the past, I just want to clarify that I myself had an old Philco record player as a child for my listening pleasure, and managed to "hear through" the sonic fog to enjoy the great music.  My first CD player was in fact a $200 RCA CD and cassette "boombox" purchased with my first paycheck in Autumn of 1987, so that I could finally play my first CD, Leontyne Price's Verdi Heroines.  Before I had that crappy boombox, a kind soul in my dorm made a cassette copy of my CD so that I could listen to those wonderful arias on a Hitachi knock-off of the Sony Walkman, on some cheap Koss headphones.

 

At first, I had thought perhaps Frank was talking about listening past the crappy playback to hear the artist/music, but he talks so much about "sorting" vague things in the equipment, so I realized he couldn't be talking about what I and probably most of us did before we had decent systems.  The first time I heard Leontyne Price at all, it was on a Time-Life audio cassette, played on one of those old mono portable cassette recorders, but I could still tell that hers was the most glorious voice I'd ever encountered.

 

Remember these, fellow old-timers?

 

?

 

I hear you. when I was growing up, most of the adults I knew had "brown goods"  radio-phonographs. Most of them were junk with flea-powered single-ended 6V6 or 6BQ5 output tubes (or even older pre-war tubes with two digit numbers like "80") feeding cheap, stamped sheet-metal basket speakers with tiny 3-4 ounce magnets mounted inside of a big piece of furniture against the front panel. No actual speaker enclosure, just a perforated piece of phenolic pressed board on the back to keep prying fingers out of the "guts" of the thing. Were it "stereo", the two sets of speakers were in the the same cabinet, usually just inches away from each other! There was one exception. My dad had a friend who was a dyed-in the wool audiophile. He was a a Tech-rep from General Electric and his speciality was power plant generators. My dad worked for a power company and this guy was the tech support for the three "units" this plant had at the time. Anyway, at the tender age of 9 or 10, my dad took me with him when he visited this guy socially. The guy was single, drove a red Jaguar XK-150 fixed-head coupe, and had the first component audio system I'd ever seen. It consisted of a McIntosh tuner/preamp and a McIntosh "60" mono tube amp (this was in the 1950's before stereo) His speaker (singular) was an Electrovoice "Patrician' , a huge cabinet with a 30-inch woofer! His turntable was a Grey brand transcription table with a Weathers arm and 'FM' phono cartridge (it worked by having the stylus modulate an FM carrier.) The guy was also a photography nut and had a number of cameras like Leicas and Hassleblads and his own darkroom. Boy, was I impressed! What I had at the time was a Stromberg Carlson all-band console radio from before WWII (it was my parent's) with a folded horn speaker chamber and an 8-watt push-pull amplifier with an RCA 45 RPM record changer sitting on top!. I wanted my dad's friend's sound so badly that I got my dad to build me a system with a 12-Watt amplifier (he built it from scratch. He even punched the holes in the blank chassis to mount the components and wired it point-to-point), he built me  a bass reflex enclosure for an 8" coaxial speaker (from Wafedale) and a British BSR all-speed record changer (A whopping $17.99 from the then mail-order firm of Radio Shack in Boston) rounded the "system" off.  Of course all the neighborhood kids had only those lousy vinyl-clad record changers with handles on them that allowed one to carry the player around.  So I had the best system of any 10 year-old in the county!. Mowing lawns that summer bought me a used Kodak "Tourist II", a bellows folding camera that took two-and-a-quarter X two-and-a-quarter "620" film. It was my first "adjustable" camera. Like I said, my dad's friend was a real influence on me. I wanted to be like him. That might explain why my first car out of college was an old Jaguar XK-140 roadster and might partially explain why I never married (but watching a friend of mine's life go down the toilet after he married was the clincher, I think - along with the women's lib movement!). I really wanted to live like that friend of my dad's. I wanted toys just like he had toys! I sure fulfilled that goal many times over. 

 

Below: typical "brown-goods" console radio/phonograph from the early 1950's. Next is the original ElectroVoice "Patrician" with the 30-inch woofer! It's exactly like my Dad's friend's speaker.  Lastly, a diagram showing the internal arrangement of the speaker components inside the 'Patrician'

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, kumakuma said:

 

Sorry to hear about your energy level but I'm a little confused by this. Surely after 30 years of working your magic, you must have other "sorted out" equipment to listen to.

His energy level can't be but so low. He has enough "energy" to post almost 3000 endlessly tedious messages here a single year!

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Not in the slightest. I've stated many times that I'm pretty weary these days - and it takes focused effort to investigate, sort out the bottlenecks in a playback chain. The NAD rig is still in limbo, and it's still the current effort - and until my personal batteries are recharged by circumstances, that's the way it will probably stay. I much prefer to not hear any ambitious system at all, than be aware of its audible deficiencies while listening - the itch to scratch is too overpowering ... .

 

I'm not sorting "vague" things - the fantasy that most have is that gear in fancy boxes, hooked together by fancy cables, "solves everything" - out of sight, out of mind. I choose to look as closely as I need to, to make sure the perceived sound is not affected by subtle aspects of the system, and its environment - that's how I achieved my original competent sound - was immensely surprised by what happened - and have pursued understanding this ever since.

 

I've explained many times the interesting behaviour of the sound field when one gets convincing sound - if anyone else has got this with "old-time" gear I would be somewhat surprised ... .

That's fine, Frank. It's just that almost nobody believes you. You don't have much in the way of credibility with this broken record of yours. But try to have a nice day, anyway. Must be getting along toward spring in your neck of the woods, eh?  Just another month to the Vernal Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere!

[gmgraves]

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

George, you work so hard at times to be as unpleasant as possible ... give it a break, eh?

Now, just what did I say that was unpleasant? I merely told the truth. I also asked you is you were anticipating Spring in your neck-of-the-woods. I know that it can snow in the winter in the Blue Mountains because there are ski resorts up there. If you're like most people, winter gets tiresome after awhile.

 

And I'll give it a break if you take your broken record off the turntable and trash it! Hows about that?

 

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

I write the posts because I want to stimulate others to consider alternative approaches to getting optimum sound - I can put energy into things in short bursts, like doing forum messages - the trouble begins when I need to sustain focused attention on something, for days and weeks - like sorting a rig ... this has got worse, lately.

 

But that's just it, Frank. You don't stimulate others, you piss 'em off with your endless bragging about how great your system is while assuming (and intimating) that everybody else's system sounds sub-par. 

 

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

I have pointed many times to people who have had the same or similar results to me - but I irritate because I don't keep quiet about it. Getting better sound should be something more widespread - I'm just doing my bit to try and make this happen ...

No, Frank. That's the problem. You're not doing your "bit". You're just antagonizing people into speculating about your mental health. The results you say you get from the equipment that you say you have is unlikely in the extreme. And your comments about recordings makes it seem like your system favors the lowest common denominator. I.E. you system doesn't raise the level of the performance of poor recordings to that of great recordings, it lowers the performance of great recordings to the level of poor ones. 

[gmgraves]

16 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 Obviously the OP isn't, although most who rarely post in other areas of the forum appear to be.

None of this recent stuff has anything to do with the title of the thread.

I think that' because as a blanket statement , this thread's title has very little meaning. The fact is (and you know this) the listening quality of a recording often has little to do with bit-depth or sampling rate. I'm sure that we all have CD quality recordings that sound better than some SACDs or hi-res LPCM recordings. We've discussed this before. It seems to have more to do with the care in the production of a recording than any other factors. Sure, I have great sounding SACDs and hi-res PCM stuff (so do you, I'm sure), but as I've said previously, I have some Red Book CD releases that just destroy SACD or other hi-res format releases of the same material. Whatever hi-res format you want talk about, the results are only as good as the care that went into the production. So, how can anyone say with impunity that they can't listen to 16-bit/44.1 KHz any more when the release quality of all current formats is all over the map? 

[gmgraves]

16 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Fair enough. But you did post a recording here which "wasn't up to snuff" - that's exactly what I then turn to, use as a guide for further tweaking of a system ... it's the refinement of a setup to the degree that those sort of recordings can "work their magic", that demonstrate what's possible.

But Frank, the kind of control over a system's sound that you brag about doing simply isn't possible. Amplifiers sound different, but good ones don't sound THAT different. The differences are fairly subtle. Soldering one's interconnects from one component to another, again could possibly yield a slight difference, but again, that difference would be subtle, and in some cases would yield no improvement whatsoever. There's not a lot one can do with commercial speakers and making your own will probably yield more control over your overall sound than any other tweak you can perform. I remember once, a number of years ago, that I replaced the mylar capacitors in my Magneplanar Tympani IIIb speakers' crossover with polypropylene "Wonder Caps" of the same value. A friend was visiting and while I was down on my hands and knees replacing caps, he was sitting in my listening chair reading a magazine. We had been listening before I made the change, and when I finished, I put on the same recording that we had been listening to before. My friend was still engrossed in whatever he was reading and oblivious to what I was doing. when the music started, he looked up from his reading and asked: "What did you just do?" I asked him why and he said that the treble and upper midrange were suddenly much cleaner and much clearer. So, I walked around to the front of the speakers, an I heard the same improvement. But again, while instantly noticeable, I can't say that I would have noticed any difference at all if some time had passed between the before and after listening test. Most of this stuff is so subtle, that if you strung a hundred tweaks of that magnitude together, it would not possibly reach the level of audio quality that you continually brag about!

Below: a Pair of Tympani III's exactly like the ones I owned. 

[gmgraves]

23 hours ago, numlog said:

but it never had anything to do with the recording quality, it had to do with the difference between 16 bit and 24, whether it be the same recording or different.

My point is how do you know that the differences that you are hearing between two "versions" of the same recording are due to differences in bit depth and sample rate? You can't know. For all you can tell one sounds better than the other for reasons that have nothing in the world to do either bit depth or sample rate. The only way that we, as consumers of recordings could tell, would be to make two parallel recordings ourselves from the same source feed (hopefully good quality microphones) into two identical recorders, one set to do 16/44.1 and the other to 24/96 (or 88.2, or 192) and then compare the two recordings. Ostensibly, and differences in quality heard then would be the result of the bit depth and sampling rate differences. But relying on commercial recordings to make value judgements about which is better, 16/44.1 or 24/96, is an empty procedure.

 

23 hours ago, numlog said:

If 24 bit is important then these CDs have more to gain than most recordings (i.e they suffer the most from 16 bit). Sample rate is also important but with upsampling options it doesnt feel like much of a problem, nothing can be helped for bit depth.

 

Before settling on anything related to bit depth I need to use a different DAC, The topping D50 should be a better tool for this than UDA38Pro .

Believe me, 24-bit is important, crucial even for digital capture of performances. But that's because of digital's intolerance of over modulation. It's a bit of a struggle to pack a wide dynamic range performance into 16 bits. On the one hand, we don't want to record at too low of a recording level, because at half the level of 16-bits (8-bits) The signal to noise ratio has dropped to 48 dB and the distortion has increased tremendously. On the other hand, we don't want to get too close to 0Vu because that means your using up all 16 bits and there isn't a 17th! The noise that digital makes when you exceed the available bit-depth has to be heard to be believed! So, what you find yourself doing is riding gain. Pulling the record level as the performance gets too loud, and pushing it when the performance gets real soft. 24-bit (and 32-bit) recording equipment gives the recordist much more latitude when recording. You can set the volume so that peaks never get any higher than –6Vu, and you're good to go knowing that at half volume you're still OK because your've still got either 12 or 16 bits below you. If you have to transfer to 16-bit at some point, you know before hand where you have to pull the peaks and push the valleys.

But I find that on playback, the difference between 16 and 24 bit program material is much less important. Yes, in a properly set-up listening test where both versions were made exactly the same way and the only difference is bit-depth and sample rate, you can hear the difference. But hi-res recordings are not so much better than Red Book CD as to make the latter unlistenable!

[gmgraves]

20 hours ago, fas42 said:

I'll stop talking about it, when people take seriously the need to eliminate flaws in the playback chain; the latter is what I always hear with other systems, indeed making them "sub-par" - my system isn't "great"; it's merely working correctly!  I get the results I do because I've made it my thing to address these areas; something you fight against doing, venomously.

 

And I'll stop taking you to task when you realize that 1) Everybody on CA has heard your spiel and noticed that you're just endlessly repeating yourself. 2) Other people's path to audio bliss is none of your business. Every audiophile KNOWS what he wants his system to sound like and works toward that goal. It may not be your idea of what a system should sound like, but that's not your decision to make for others, now is it? I don't fight against doing whatever it is you say you do, Frank, I fight against your endless bragging about it and your assumption that only your system and your "method" make for great listening. 

20 hours ago, fas42 said:

Well recorded pieces still sound as "good" as they always do; lifting the standard of playback allows one to become emotionally immersed in the music making captured in technically poor recordings, rather than just having them sounding like quaint, historical curiousities - I prefer to enjoy the spirit of the music, as compared to indulging in being an aggressive critic of the recording artifact.

 

Then what you are saying is that you don't really care that a recording is poor, that you can get pleasure from poor recordings as well as good ones. That's fine, when I listen to a 78, I don't expect great sound from it. There's a reason why it sounds poor compared to more modern recordings because the technology didn't exist to do better. So I can enjoy it for the performance and overlook the technical shortcomings. But there is no excuse for poor recordings in this day and age, and, in fact, there's been no excuse for poor recordings since the LP and audio tape in the early 1950's and I cannot abide those.  

But this is not what you have been saying in past posts! You have lead us all to believe that when you apply your 'method' to your system it makes all recordings, great and poor sound wonderful. That's quite a different story from saying that you can enjoy poor recordings in spite of their shortcomings.

[gmgraves]

15 minutes ago, diecaster said:

 

Sure we do. Then we use all 16 bits as effectively as possible. As long as we don't go past 0Vu we are golden as there will be no clipping.

I think we are working at cross purposes. Ideally, yes, we want to use all 16-bits, but the closer we get to 0Vu, the more danger there is that we will go over it. Musicians don't play exactly the same way every time. One time we might set the record level to just touch zero on the Vu meter on a crescendo and all is good, but the next run-through, the crescendo might be just a hair louder - and that's all it takes. It's not like the days of analog tape. In those days on a half-track recorder running at 15 or 30 ips, occasionally going over 0Vu was no big deal. In fact on my Otari MX5050s I could bang the pin of the meter occasionally and not hear it on playback and I could regularly hit +3 on the meter for several seconds without any ill effects. So, if the orchestra plays a little louder in the performance than they did in rehearsal, no big deal. Not so with digital. In order to avoid ruining the recording, one needs to either employ a limiter or stay away from zero Vu when doing digital recording.  

[gmgraves]

40 minutes ago, semente said:

 

You probably won't agree but it is my conviction that a better system will steer you towards listening to better music... ?

I don't see how anyone could not agree. I'll buy a recording, find it sounds awful, and continue my search for a good sounding recording of that work. I'll likely never play the bad one again. Is that not how everybody responds to bad sounding recordings? 

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, Summit said:

 

Many records are heavily compressed or manipulated. No matter how good system you got it cannot compensate for many of the errors that is made in the studio or concert then the recording was made. If the record has no bass below 50 Hz or a very shrill sounding treble no system can compensate for it.

If one has a digital "equalizer" one can, with judicious application, add back some bass and possibly tame a shrill top-end a smidgen. But it's easy to overdo, and you cannot "dial away" distortion. 

Sometimes I use my Zoom H6 "HandyCorder" to record jazz ensembles in small night-spots. It's convenient. Set the recorder on a camera tripod and connect the remote control cord to it; choose either the M-S  or coincident mike head for the recorder (it comes with both) and align the recorder to the musicians accordingly. Sit at a near-by table with the remote and and a pair of headphones on my head and record away. Now, the problem with these hand-held recorders with built-in microphones is that all of them are electret condenser mikes with tiny diaphragms. None I've ever used have any bass to speak of. They all seem to fall-off like rocks below 100 Hz or so. When I get home, I transfer the recording from the Flash card to my hard disk for editing. I find that if I open the performance in Audacity, I can use the application's bass boost feature to digitally enhance the bass performance without any unwanted side effects. I can't restore the bass to 20 Hz, naturally, but I can get to a nice clean 40 Hz. When I give the musicians their 16-bit CDs of their performance, they are amazed that a small recorder like that can do such a remarkable job!. 

[gmgraves]

Just now, diecaster said:

 

This is why you don't record in 16 bits. When you do the 16 bit mastering from a higher bit depth source, you make sure you get close to 0Vu with out clipping. This way you keep all the dynamic range.

Well, of course. I think I said that in a post above earlier today. 

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

It must be a Yank thing, this obsession about "bragging", ... I could mention that I enjoy rescuing appliances and devices that stop working - as do many others - usually, something trivial is playing up, or broken - you fix it, and full functionality is restored .. quite satisfying, really. In your book, talking of this as a method of not throwing out perfectly good machinery, and spending lots of money replacing the discarded items would be "boasting" - a rather strange perspective, I find.

 

Frank. It is not a "Yank" thing. But your endless carping about how good your system sounds and how great your method is at wringing the last bit of performance out of mediocre components IS bragging, I don't know what else you could call it. Do you? 

 

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

You see, there is no contradiction in those last two statements! The technically poor recordings have shortcomings, yes - but subjectively they don't exist! You still can't grasp that for at least a high percentage of people a masking behaviour occurs, within the brain, when the standard of replay is good enough - this is totally beyond one's conscious control; I have heard this switch take place hundreds, thousands of times, I know it happens like I know the sun comes up in the morning - I look forward to, and fully expect this behaviour.

It certainly is a contradiction. I venture to say that to almost everybody subjectively poor recordings sound poor. The shortcomings do exist. Where you get the idea that they don't is, well, somethings that seems to occur only in your head. I suspect what you describe above is something that happens only to you. Of course, if you are talking about pop music, I don't really have any feel about what a pop lover's expectations are WRT recording quality. To me, it all sounds atrocious and I'll readily admit that I wouldn't know a good rock recording from a terrible one because I have no way to gauge the quality. It's like my lady friend Alison continually trying to get me to eat Brussels sprouts. I hate 'em. It's the only veggie that I don't like and won't eat. She keeps telling me that her latest recipe for the sprouts will make me like them. It doesn't matter how she cooks them or what she does with them, they taste like S__t to me. IOW, in my opinion, there is no good way to cook sprouts! To me most rock music sounds like Brussels sprouts taste! It occurs to me that to someone who loves rock and certain performances of certain songs by certain performers, that it doesn't matter how the recording sounds, because the performance is what it is. I wouldn't know about that. In the classical world there are many performances of most works available. If you buy a performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony by, say, Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic and it sounds bad, then you go and buy one perhaps by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony that sounds great. There was a time in the 1960's and 1970's when the major record labels started to record in multiple tracks (as many as 96 for a symphony orchestra and a microphone for each track) and the resulting recordings sounded horrible, but nobody does that these days. Unfortunately some of the best performances by some of the greatest conductors and orchestras, when they were at their peaks, were ruined by this practice. Then the great conductors started to die off: Szell, Walter, Ormandy, Leinsdorf, Bernstein, Von Karajan, etc. and all we have from their mature years as conductors are recordings that sound like crap!

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, sandyk said:

Perhaps it's time for Frank and George to put each other on IGNORE lists ?

It's probably a good idea. I've never done on it on CA and while I know how to ignore a topic I don't see how to ignore a contributor. 

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 In that case, perhaps try using willpower, although that often doesn't work for me and quite a few other  regulars apparently.

I hear you, my friend. It is difficult. 

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

if others are interested in pursuing this path then I'm happy to help them.

Oh really? When's that gonna start?

 

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

... I can't help you ...

I don't recall asking for help

15 hours ago, fas42 said:

Which is exactly what the value is in what I promote - I get to hear the excellence in what they produced, because the system disappears enough, and reveals the detail in those recordings well enough so that "I'm there".

Again (for the umpteenth time), what you say is impossible. The more resolving and revealing that a system is, the worse poor recordings sound, not better. here's an analogy that I think works to explain it:

 

You buy a film and project it. It's slightly out of focus. "I'll fix that!", you say.  and you replace your mediocre, but serviceable Bausch & Lomb projector lens with a really expensive super high-resolution Zeiss-Ikon projection lens and fit it to your projector. Then you run the film again. Everything has improved. You can now see the film grain in clear relief. The contrast between the light and dark areas has improved; whites are whiter and blacks are blacker, but the image is still slightly out of focus and, if anything, because the lens is so much better, that out-of-focus image on the screen is even more annoying than before. The analogy works for audio and hifi gear as well. The better the system is, the more that a recording's "warts" stand out in bold relief! 

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Depends upon what you're after - if one wishes to be aware of all the mistakes made in the recording, every tiny blemish in the production, then you'll need a system which reveals less of what was in front of the microphones; so that you concentrate on the technical deficiencies. The masking that occurs when the sense of the musical content is too strong will get in the way of consciously tuning into an analysis of the recording qualities - a mastering engineer may require a 'poorer' setup, so that he can do his job 'properly'.

Talk about double-talk! If one wishes to hear the blemishes in the recording one needs a system that reveals less of what was before the microphone! Is anybody buying this nonsense? If somebody (other than Frank) understands this gibberish, I wish he or she would explain it to me!