Recording freak?

Every audiophile has his/her own story, in the mean time, we shouldn't discount female audiophile I know they are small in number. And people telling me that female has better hearing than us. How ironic! I am sure they are as interesting. I for one like to look deep into their audio ideology and experience in a chat session.

I once asked an audiophile, what does he seek in a playback. He blatantly replied; recording quality. I must confess that I appreciate his frankness and believe most audiophiles are seeking surreal recording. He further stressed why spend more if you can obtain emotions or musicality from a cheap mini compo? You don't get much quality from mini compo. Well, he got his points, I hesitantly agreed.



Playback is all about details? But, if I'd rephrase the subject a bit. Would you (audiophile) be able to enjoy a high quality recording of foreign music that you don't understand? Maybe some. I can't answer that on your behalf, but a definite no for me. A nuisance, that's what it is. Melody is subjective as with all music too. Music must first be understood before conveying emotions, try the Australian aboriginal music as above. The play was long, I fell asleep listening to it. It isn't hard to understand that you tend to have a strong affection for the music in your growing years. Because they occupy a special place in your heart. You styled according to them too! The current music are less exciting, plain.

A masterful performance beats everything, particularly classical music. IMHO, no one surpass Carlos Kleiber on Beethoven's Symphony No 5. Whilst most audiophile recordings are boring. Their recording purposedly stretching the limit of your system. Victorious if you are able to reproduce what it is intended. And victor gets all the glory, deep down he is a poor soul. Audiophile turns sound engineer, the earlier is music enjoyment, the later is tactical.

Wonder how will it like if "Pretty woman" is not sung by the charismatic Roy Orbison? The magic is gone. It is the artistry performance that matters. I play 80s and 90s canto pop and mandarin pop, to some they represent a disgrace? I say this is plainly egoistic at play. High end means classy music? Get out of here. A system is a tool to play what you want it to play and when you want to play. A master and slave relationship, the slave is to serve the master. I can't stand people telling me what I can play or can't play, tasteful music or cheap music. Definitely not in the context of system prowess, this is altogether a different story.

Audioing is a series of continuous effort identifying the bottleneck and improve on it. Each upgrade/tweak removes major bottleneck, ushers in a new bottleneck, presumably a smaller one. That's a sign of progression. Passion and money are two critical ingredients you can have not. Better component always comes in with a hefty price tag. The approach can be varied. Some take speaker positioning as primary route to resolve sonic inadequacy, others with cabling, power treatment, tweaking, room acoustics or even component upgrade. The scope is quite wide, so to speak. There are certain situations calling for specific solutions, profoundly. Amputating your leg instead of your wounded arm is clearly not a bright thing to do. Hitting the bullseye gives maximum return over your investment, be smart to play your card right for most have an finite fund. How I wish I have a money printing machine in my garage.

Let dial in a lit deeper on bottleneck. Splitting the budget equally to source, amp and speaker is simply unjust. In entry level audio, it is probably wise to put most of your budget in amp since entry level source and speaker are superlatively low cost for reasonable quality of sound, things pretty much remains status quo to mid fi audio. Speaker is the biggest bottleneck in high end audio which goes without saying speaker technology is costly. It takes a great speaker often with a hefty price to reveal the shortcomings of the front end. A system that punches beyond its weight should resemble a system like our road system. Six-lane express way source, four-lane amp and two-lane speaker. I hold the belief that your system is as good as your source regardless how great your system is. Nothing beats a first pressing CD.

Food for thoughts. Good night.