More on the Subject of Speaker Advice

That depends on exactly what job you think you’re giving it to do.

If its job is to allow you to enjoy music in the comfort of your home, then the little box speakers you see pictured to the left can do that job just fine, with the caveat that you must be able to enjoy the kind of sound that comes out of little boxes.

If the job you give your stereo to do is to reproduce the full range of music with high fidelity, then the little boxes you see pictured are going to fail miserably. Until the laws of physics are repealed, however that might happen, they will never be able to reproduce music in a lifelike way.

I like big dynamic speakers because they do a better job of reproducing music in a lifelike way compared to every other speaker I have ever heard, horns included, which can be very lifelike indeed, but have other shortcomings that I cannot abide.

This is not just another post bashing small speakers. I say these things to introduce the comment sent to me that you see below.

I received this anonymous letter recently in reply to a commentary I had written entitled Tone Poets and one-legged Tarzans.

Hi,
Thanks for writing.

Little box speakers do produce sound of some quality. It would be foolish for me to say that one can’t actually hear something through them. The question is how much?

I believe the answer is not much, and that nobody reviewing records, or comparing one pressing to another, should be fooling himself into thinking he can do either one with a speaker of such little fidelity to the sound of live music.

Good stereos playing good records can sound like live music. With the volume up high and a shootout winning pressing on the table, in our studio the best of RVG’s recordings sound very much like live music

Does anyone think that, brought into this gentleman’s listening room wearing a blindfold and seated in the listening chair, he could be fooled into thinking he was hearing live music instead something coming out of some boxes?

Nothing I’ve played that Kevin Gray mastered, when played on the system we use — the one we developed specifically to evaluate the sound quality of records — was ever noticeably better than mediocre.

We’ve played his records by the score. They all suffer from the same suite of shortcomings to one degree or another, the specifics of which we have described in detail in post after post throughout this blog. (Here is a good example of some of his recent work.)

If this fellow with his little box speakers hears some of the things we can hear, good for him.

But he certainly cannot hear all of them, and he certainly can’t hear even the ones he does hear all that well, and for those reasons I am not the least bit interested in what he thinks about RVG’s mastering.

He needs better equipment to make such judgments, the kind of equipment it took us many decades to discover, acquire and tweak.

Consider the analogy of using headphones to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of multiple pressings of the same album.

I can hear a great deal through headphones, but I would never want to evaluate a recording on headphones for this simple reason: I know that when I play that same recording on our big system, I will hear and feel more than I could even imagine might be on the recording when I heard it through headphones.

This fellow has headphone-quality speakers. Their design is just too limited to be able to tell him enough of what he needs to know. If he ever gets big speakers and puts them in a big room, he will know what he’s been missing, and fast.

Our system was designed to play recorded music at live levels, with all the energy and size and power that live music is known for. We did this in order to judge the most important aspect of recorded sound, which is to make it seem as if you are in the presence of live musicians performing in your listening room.

We want our experience of music to be completely immersive, the way live music is completely immersive. And I’m here to tell you that I have had a great deal of those immersive experiences with the system we have when it’s reproducing the vintage pressings that win shootouts.

That’s why we can write about the strengths and weaknesses of so many records in such detail. Rarely have these “live music” qualities been written about in much depth elsewhere, as far as I know. Not credibly, anyway.

We believe that is because, one, our stereo plays records with more fidelity than is possible with other systems, and, two, we listen more critically than others do.

The system we built over decades to do this work has no trouble making it clear to us that Kevin Gray’s remasters are rarely much better than passable, when they aren’t downright awful. Our prediction is that he will keep making records of substandard quality. I understand he has been known to say that his remastered pressings are superior to any and all originals, so why fix what ain’t broken?

Back to Tone Poets

We will be playing at least one or two Tone Poets pressings in shootouts sometime later this year. We look forward to revealing our findings once the results are in.

To imagine that Kevin Gray will somehow master a record that can hold a candle to the best vintage pressings is to ignore the evidence provided by his vast body of work to date.

We can’t say it’s impossible, but if it were possible, we would definitely be betting the farm against it.

That said, we will be playing his records with an open mind as well as open ears. We will describe the sound he has achieved on whatever pressing of his we play as accurately as possible.

We will be judging his records, along with originals and other reissues, with respect to the most important question we can ask of what we play: which pressings come the closest to the sound of live music?

Our big speakers, pulled well out into a dedicated, heavily-treated, custom-built studio, along with the thousands of hours of experience we’ve acquired doing this kind of work, allow us to answer that question for every record we play.

All the sonic differences rl1856 describes between the originals and the reissues may be accurate regarding the perspective, the soundstage, the frequency extremes, the micro detail — I grant that he might be right about all of it.

Because it’s all completely beside the point.

When he writes:

So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

In this paragraph, with these two questions, he completely gives away the game. The game audiophiles love to play.

What do we want? Which of these two options, A or B?

A “better version of what we are familiar with” or “a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape”?

The answer is we don’t want either of these things.

We want the sound of live music. Whichever pressing gives us more of that is the one we want. What else could it be?

Comparing soundstage width and depth and micro-dynamics is fine for those who like to spend their time doing that sort of thing.

It’s a job a system with little box speakers can do.

Playing music loud enough and powerfully enough to make you think you are in the living presence of musicians?

That’s what we like to spend our time doing. That’s the job we gave our system to do.

And it’s ludicrous to think it could ever be done with little box speakers.

Best, TP

P.S.

I want thank our comment writer for giving me the opportunity to clear a few things up.

I hope it wasn’t too long for those who managed to stick it out to the end.

---

Further Reading

• Remember: music does the driving
• How good are some of the other records Kevin Gray has mastered?
• First get good sound – then you can recognize and collect good records