My new gear turned “awesome” to “crap” ! How do I deal?

 You just suck it up and be grateful that you're in a position to have gear good enough to be so revealing. You should also keep a pair of lower-end headphones on hand for those times when you need them. I have some recordings that are virtually unlistenable with my HD800's (e.g. bass heavy).

Everything sounds great on my HD 485s. . . some things sound like like crap on my HD 650s. Using lesser 'phones might be a solution, I agree with that.

Yep, you just have to suck it up. I find that if the music really does it for me, it'll still get its emotion across even if the recording is rather bland, but I have gone off the odd piece of music because of the recording itself. If you come back to those kinds of recordings later, and still find the music doesn't do enough, then it may be as much that you've gone off the music itself than the actual sound quality.

Originally Posted by Justin Uthadude 

some music that I used to think sounded ‘killer’ now sounds flat, dull and well . . . obviously not that good

Maybe your storage mediums are rotting somehow? it's been thoroughly discussed in that thread: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/451369/why-flac-is-better

This is why I still enjoy music from my iPod and Portapros. They're just fun to listen to, not to dissect, which happens to me all to often when I listen on my full rig.

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeperry 

 

 

Maybe your storage mediums are rotting somehow? it's been thoroughly discussed in that thread: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/451369/why-flac-is-better

Is there any weight to that though?

OT, but my musical tastes have changed with increasingly better equipment, jazz and classical is still pretty boring tho.

Sadly I'm experiencing this myself. I've always been into music, but only recently gotten into hi-fi. Now that I'm starting to upgrade my gear some of my favorite tracks are stuck in 128-256k MP3's that sound dull on the good gear.

I guess my solution is going to be to buy CD's of the stuff I truly enjoy, then rip them to Apple Lossless.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Satellite_6 

Is there any weight to that though?

 

Any weight to the idea that FLAC is better than mp3?  Yes.  Some people say 320 and FLAC are equal (I disagree), but anything less than 320kbps is compressed too much to get all of the frequencies your ears can hear.  You can open a file in Audacity and look at the sound spectrum... compare a 256 to a 320 to a FLAC.  FLAC is a lossless codec and the compression does no permanent damage to the file.  Once a file has been turned into an mp3, it is compressed beyond the point of no return and you start losing sound quality.  Heres the wiki page to find out more info on FLAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

All nerdy wordy stuff aside, let your ears do the choosing... FLAC is awesome!  If you are using itunes, you will have to use a program like xld (Mac) to encode the FLAC to Apple Lossless bcz iTunes doesn't support FLAC.  It's an Apple stubborn thing... Apple Lossless is their lossless codec and they want to support it and not someone elses.

What he said. Really opened me up to different genre's of music due to the sonic quality of the recordings. Jazz and classical were last on the list ......well actually i never listened to either until i seeked out the ultimate pleasure of why we buy this gear, and never looked back Cheers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik 

Yup. The gear actually changed my musical tastes to an extent. I've always loved classical, but have gotten into it more deeply as I've been exposed to more great recordings. I had never liked jazz, but eventually developed a taste and the great recordings pulled me in further. I've also tried new artists only because they had a disc out on SACD and came to love them.

Think of this more as an opportunity to broaden your tastes. Seek out good recordings by well-regarded artists and open yourself up. There's some badly recorded popular music I enjoy, but my listening pleasure really increased as I opened up.