Can your system actually sound too good??

Last night I was playing some typical a'phile recordings...you know Patricia Barber and the like.All sounded amazing and I wanted to just keep on enjoying the music. So, i mistakenly put on one of my favorite groups...U2.
How to dismantle an Atomic Bomb..which has a nice selection of great tunes from the boys. The whole album sounded like crap! No real imaging, bass that was bloated and unrealistic, Bono's voice was strained and thin, The Edge's guitar sounded anemic and very un-lifelike...and so on. Now here's the thing that i think was going on...my system is highly resolving, and as such I had taken a recording that is sub par to begin with and exposed all of its warts! Now, I totally enjoy this album on my car system, and I have enjoyed it on other mid-fi systems. Question is, are we sometimes missing the enjoyment of music as a'philes, simply because our systems can actually sound too good for the recording in question ( usually rock). Anyone else believe this is possible?

 

Interesting, why not?? All the warts are now exposed and the recording is heard in all its less than musical 'glory'...This has never happened to you?

 

When tuning my system I strive to achieve the balance between great-sounding audiophile recordings and pretty-good-sounding modern recordings. My system must not be too revealing of the brightness, harshness, dynamic compression and other inevitable flaws. NOS Mullard CV4003 tubes in the pre-amp and a well-integrated subwoofer do help a lot.

 

Making system upgrades that decrease distortion is wiser than changes that "detail chasers choose in my opinion because of how the vast amount of recordings actually are."

 

IMO it is indeed possible to make a system too revealing, especially with SS gear. And the solution to this problem is: tube gear which sounds like tube gear.

 

How can it sound too good when You say it doesn´t sound good? No it´s a logical fallacy, components cannot be too good.

 

Ouch!

 

I have friends that have spent large sums of money chasing audio nirvana, and their musical tastes morphed into music that made the system sound great.
If your system only sounds great with such recordings there's something amiss.

 

Agree, audiophile recordings sound great on any decent system.

 

Because it's the recording not the gear.

 

To me so long as the system gives the music some body along with the detail then even average recordings will sound good. Some material is just badly done though and as you say best left for the car.

It would be awful to just, as mentioned above, be limited to listening to audiophile recordings for their own sake.

 

I believe that it's all in the speakers. There are certain speakers that make everything sound very musical even the worst of recordings. Play something on Quad, or Harbeth, or the Stirling LS3/6 and tell me if you cannot stand the sound. Anything. Even the worst recording will sound bearable.
Then take the legendary ribbon Apogees. Or Magnepan or Tad or Magico. All ruthlessly revealing. Play a well recorded album and it's heaven. Play something that was not recorded that well and you want to leave the room.

 

Umm, lemme think about it...………..Nope

 

Unfortunately the old maxim of Garbage in, Garbage out applies and never more brutally than with fine audio systems. For example, take our esteemed host's mastering of Nat King Cole for Analogue Productions and compare them to the standard releases to see where the blame truly lies.

 

In my experience it is possible to create a system with great resolution and imaging that limits good listening to spectacularly well-produced and recorded music. The real magic trick (IMO only) is to put together a system that showcases such audiophile recordings and also makes "everyday" recordings sound pretty good too.

 

This.

It's up to each of us to decide once we reach the point that you have how much further in this pursuit we want to venture. If it's taking away from your enjoyment of your favorite music it might be time for a change.

 

When I bought my Yamaha A-S3000 I found that some recordings which I had previously thought were exemplary were now revealed as less than optimal.

 

This is why my ears remain untrained. My wish is to enjoy music, not recordings.

 

Nah, my system isn't nearly good enough to sound "too good."

 

Thee and me, both

 

Chasing down the best masterings, if they exist, is more productive than thinking the fault lies with your equipment, and spending accordingly.

 

To some extent, it is dependent on how you build your high end system and what you prioritize. If you are trying to emphasize "detail" (hearing the shimmer of every rivet on a cymbal), you might have a system that is somewhat lean in the upper bass and this could exacerbate problems with lean sounding recordings. Systems that are warmer sounding are sometimes characterized as muddy or lacking in clarity, but, they tend to be more forgiving with more bad recordings.

The more focused and narrow one gets in pursuit of certain particular characteristics--detail, or dynamics or deep bass or whatever--the choice of recordings that match the particular profile narrows.

 

No, and I don't worry about it! It's all about the music for me, not the system!

 

That is what I was thinking. The OP is experiencing about worst of squashed masters. I know, there are worse but this one is Bad with a capital B.
@DaveyF , it's the recording. When this happens, I decide not to play it. My philosophy, if they wanted me to listen to it they would have made it listenable. I'm not going to torture myself with it when there are plenty of other recordings that are great to hear.

Funny, this CD came out about the time I felt pushed back into vinyl, looking for uncompressed masters of albums.

On the flip side, last night I played the Mofi pressing of In Utero and it was fantastic at a good volume. Although In Utero came out ten years earlier so it wasn't as destroyed as Atomic Bomb.