Home General Asylum

General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

RE: How would you define "good sound" and/or "bad sound"?

Good sound means you can be captivated and musically satisfied by recordings of music regardless of the quality of the recording. With a good stereo one can evaluate recording quality but why bother? The difficulty is extracting oneself from the music in order to do it.

Bad sound = boomboxes, car stereos, low fi, and bad sounding expensive audio systems (especially those whose owners have a boombox in the garage that they claim sounds great on crappy pop/rock recordings). With these kinds of expensive systems one rarely hears the music over the attributes of the recording.

"I guess I'm especially interested in why you might think that recording quality could have little (or nothing?) to do with sound quality."

The only limitation imposed by studio or less than ideal recordings on a good hi-fi is how loud it can be played back.

Personally I am far more put off by overbearing accompaniment on recordings of musicians who strive to be taken seriously or cute technical additions or heavy handed production or squeeky clean sounding pop/rock music. This stuff might sound good - but I have no interest in hearing it.

A good recording of something that sounds bad live is still going to sound bad. There is no reason whatsoever to conclude that a compressed, eq'd, cut and paste studio production can't sound great. I love the sound of lofi recordings - by definition these are bad recordings yet they can sound fantastic.

I hope that clear it up.




Edits: 12/12/10 12/12/10

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Signature Sound   [ Signature Sound Lounge ]


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.