One of the toughest things audiophiles must face is the reality that some of their favorite music hasn’t been recorded perfectly. If you are used to listening to beautifully executed modern recordings, many of the great old tunes sound pretty rough in comparison.
Recently, my designer friend and I have been experimenting with replacing his discontinued AtmaTec Air Motion Transformer speakers with something that sounds just as exceptional. To see how close we could get, we ended up building a new speaker pair out of Spanish manufacturer Beyma’s powerful new horn-loaded Air Motion Transformer tweeter/midrange drivers, along with Beyma’s woofers and crossover electronics. After a few days of tweaking, I loved the speakers that I milked out of them! When my friend came by to hear the result, we put on the older Doobie Brothers album The Captain and Me with lead singer Tom Johnston. It was the album that audio salespeople regularly used in the mid-1970s to show off the great music systems available at the time. However, Johnston’s uniquely cutting voice was compressed (the louds and softs all squished together like crazy), and my friend’s first impression was that the speakers were very harsh.
It took a second listening session on a wide range of recordings for him to know that the problem was the recording itself, and that the speakers held up very well when compared to his discontinued AtmaTec AMTs.
In purist audiophile circles, it is generally frowned upon to adjust the sound of a less than perfect recording to one’s taste. Instead, the audio system should play the best recordings properly. Then you’re supposed to listen around the recording flaws, because any adjustments always have measurable imperfections of their own.
Now, I’m as tweaky as anybody, but I can tell you that most of my 2000-plus albums are not always audiophile quality. So what are we to do? Listen to bad sounds from our favorite music groups? Sorry, not me!
Most audiophile amps don’t even sport tone controls to soften the roughness of the highs or to bring up the bass. There are many companies that do have tone controls, filters, or equalizers that make your imperfect albums more palatable, but not so many in the audiophile sector.
If you know that most of your recordings are more primitive, with some harshness that comes through in a predictable way, you can assemble components that minimize the problem. Some amps are soft in the highs, and some speakers have extra bass, for example, so you can let the less than neutral colorizations of the speakers, amps, or sources work for you to essentially “equalize” your system’s sound to your taste. However, if you’re taming your harsh recordings, your best recordings will be compromised by that. Better to have a pre-amp that has tone controls, or a decent equalizer with presets, so one quick push of a button or turn of a dial can make your MP3 files or poorly recorded albums of your favorite groups sound musical without fuss.
Our recording industry has other sound imperfections as well, and there are devices brilliantly designed to make them more musical.
Records have noise, pops, and clicks. Tapes have hiss. Both are dynamically compromised. Gadgets still exist that can make the pops and hiss all but inaudible. I recently heard an exotic digital program for LPs that made an old record sound like an audiophile master disc! It worked so well that a jazz record label that lost some master tapes to a fire was going to use it to rerelease some of their lost titles, using old LPs as their replacement masters.
Digital files in which data is thrown away, like MP3s, often sound harsh and bright. Re-equalizing can make them sound quite musical.
Once you’ve heard recordings that make full use of the 24-bit/192k sampling rates to capture the monstrous dynamic kick and incredible refinement of true large musical groups, you may find that even your favorite old audiophile direct-to-disc records are suddenly too tame to sound live. Dynamic range expanders from companies like dbx and RG Dynamics are forgotten vintage solutions that can make a big improvement on those old recordings. Be gentle. They can sound awful if over-applied.
Today, I’m not going to cover the myriad improvements and refinements that can come from better speaker and source wiring, better musical sources, and even from boxes that clean up the electricity from our electrical outlets.
Those can be ever-added joys once you’ve built a basic audiophile system that is fine-tuned to make the most of your personal listening habits and tastes. Whether it’s you or your audio expert who spends that time tweaking your system, the music continues to become ever more amazing.
It’s truly a satisfying journey. Never stop listening to real live music! And don’t ever give up on imperfect recordings of musical groups that you love.
Paul Squillo has been an AV consultant for 52 years. He owns Golden Ears in Fairfield, Iowa.