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 Until the laws of physics are repealed, however that might happen, they will never be able to reproduce music in a lifelike way.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.
Another poster defended rl1856’s claims for the abilities of his system to judge different pressings, noting that his criticisms of these remastered records — both on Tone Poets and Classic Records — generally align with mine.
I find this ending hilarious: “Never Played One – To be clear, we have never played a Tone Poets record. We’ve played many titles mastered by Kevin Gray, and we know that he is credited with mastering some records for the label. Without exception we find that his remastered records leave a lot to be desired. You can find many of them in our Hall of Shame. Anyone defending his work to me has some heavy lifting to do.”
You condemn rl1856 for expressing an opinion regarding something YOU ADMIT YOU NEVER HEARD because you believe his equipment is not resolving enough ? The irony is that his opinion largely mirrors yours regarding the sonic virtues of original RVG recordings ! How is it that he, listening through his “inferior” system can hear the virtues you ascribe to RVG pressings, and also hear when those virtues are not present?
My reply, after a week of thinking about the points this gentleman makes, can be seen below.
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.)
(more…)
More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain
When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to its sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the analog stuff we adore about the sound of the best copies.
This is precisely the kind of album they don’t do well with.
The KEF speakers you see pictured retail for $8,999.
In that post, I took a certain person (rl1856) to task for making judgments about pressings using speakers that are not capable of doing the job he wants them to do, which is to make it possible for him to “easily hear differences in LP quality.”
An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. 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.
My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.