albums like these , should be listened in good quality , say a great vinyl rip (the new ear candy is VR , gentlemen) at least 16/44 FLAClistening to music off youtube from a 1000$ iem , sounds like driving a ferrari in a mud roadnot worthy of the car/iem ,and doesnot let the car/iem show its true nature/potentialcheers
Quote from: music_4321 on April 15, 2015, 01:23:13 PMDear Señor Anaxilus,Do us a favour and tell us if your ultra uber resolving gear reveals issues with the following track, particularly in the sibilance department: http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/When+Poets+Dreamed+Of+Angels/4iitLW?src=5If it does, either your gear ain't good enough and the Angies (and AK240) rule, or the Angies suck and you and your gear rule…or a friendly compromise: our sibilance tolerance levels are different.Using my Laptop (JRiver 20)>GO450>Leckerton UHA6Smk2>UERM custom modded:First thing's first. Your grooveshark linked track of the 'reissue' or 'remaster' sounds quite LOUD with quite a bit of compression making everything go wub wub and blurring the imaging and transients. I went ahead and looked it up here to see if it was my imagination.http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=david+sylvian&album=Lo and behold, it's not. Just to reconfirm I decided to go to that venerable audio reference library in the sky known as youtube to see how your grooveshark remaster compared to other prior non-remastered tracks. Lo and behold again, we now have natural reverb and decay with clean imaging and transients that are actually natural and not compressed. Even using youtube's shitty compression which is another separate issue.As for sibilance, on your Grooveshark track I do detect and ever so slight elevation of 'sss' over the natural sibilants in his vocal speech patterns but nothing too overly fatiguing for long term listening. However, on the youboob track the sibilants are much much more natural and completely unfatiguing. No surprise as your grooveshark track has had loudness applied in the mastering making everything pop more (including vocal sibilance). So if you hear absolutely no sibilance on either track I have a hard time accepting your rig as more accurate since I can detect a clear difference in two separate masters (unless you've added compression in your upload process or rip which I doubt). When you can hear vocal sibilance naturally just talking to a person just by saying something like, "your gear suckss" I don't find it something that needs to be oppressed or removed by upstream gear. So if your AK240 and Angie didn't reveal those differences, maybe that's something we all should look at when considering an uber-resolving piece of kit. YMMV.PS-OJ tends to prefer a hint of warmth just fyi (I've heard most of his gear and tonal preferences in person and that's my opinion. Marvey likes it even a hair warmer up top than OJ) and it has nothing to do with ruler flat measured neutrality in FR. Warm and sibilant upstreams can both measure flat. No surprise.
Dear Señor Anaxilus,Do us a favour and tell us if your ultra uber resolving gear reveals issues with the following track, particularly in the sibilance department: http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/When+Poets+Dreamed+Of+Angels/4iitLW?src=5If it does, either your gear ain't good enough and the Angies (and AK240) rule, or the Angies suck and you and your gear rule…or a friendly compromise: our sibilance tolerance levels are different.
That measures the album min/max and avg, not the track. They do NOT sound the same at the same volume. Unless maybe you use an AK240. I volume match when A/Bing. There's also more than just DR that's at issue with the remaster fwiw. You can keep the apology.
As noted in my post, I swapped cables so I could specifically compare both tracks using my MacBook Pro, not the AK240.We'll just have to agree to strongly disagree on this one.
Turns out that the real difference is not in dynamic range but in amplitude (volume) of the whole recording, that is, the remastered version is simply pretty much a louder version of the original 1987 CD pressing. When I volume matched both versions, they sounded almost identical. I now remember quite well why I didn't get the remaster at the time — for one, it didn't include the last track, one of my favourites on the album (a track, btw, that was not part of the original 1987 vinyl edition, which had 9 tracks instead of the 10 the first CD pressing CD had), but also the rest of the album had not been improved sonically.Now, after re-reading your post, it almost sounds as if both versions are quite different sounding, and the remastered being pretty much a piece of shit sonically. While dynamic range on both versions could be better, they're both actually fairly decent in that regard.So, I went to the DR database site you linked to and checked just how different both versions were: lo and behold indeed, they're nearly identical!http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=david+sylvian&album=secrets+of+the+beehive
