Listening to the Beatles on my $6000 cans... - Page 4

Good gear doesn't necessarily contribute to both. What I like about low fidelity gear is I can listen to bad recordings or music I dislike and have the sound "beautified". I think low fidelity gear all share something in common, that they have some predictable way of presenting sound. Consider if you watched a movie with an actor who is very unskilled and obnoxious, do you really want to hear and see him in high fidelity?

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Originally Posted by haloxt 

Good gear doesn't necessarily contribute to both. What I like about low fidelity gear is I can listen to bad recordings or music I dislike and have the sound "beautified".

Perhaps not, but how do you beautify bad music?

I don't think I'd say "beautified", but one of the advantages of having mid-fi or low-fi equipment in addition to a top of the line setup is to be able to comfortably listen to poorly-produced recordings and low-quality MP3s.

The things that make high-end gear great -- equipment capable of so much detail that the musicians all but appear materially in front of you -- are the same things that can make poorly produced recordings sound distractingly false, noisy, and artificial. When it has immense dynamic range, it can make overcompressed recordings sound flat and noisy; when it has incredibly even (perceived) frequency response, it can make the tape hiss and surface noise distract you from the performance.

It's not a universal truth, of course. Some music is too beloved to allow the tape hiss to get in the way, and some equipment can be both incredibly resolving and very forgiving. But there's frequently a tradeoff to be made, on top of which there's simply some music that works so well with non-audiophile-approved kit that there's no incentive to upgrade.

KneelJung, I think low-fi gear beautifies bad music and recordings by simplifying the sound by their inherent limitations. They may also sometimes simplify the sound by sound signature but that's not what I am referring to. With low fidelity gear, the microdetails usually aren't high resolution enough to grab your attention, and macrodetails are predictable or repetitive one way or another. I believe that if you watch a movie through a small screen, on a subconscious level you think that it is the actors' original intent to be observed small, when in fact they have no choice on the size of your tv. Or in other words, it is harder to differentiate between the actors' original intent, the limitations of recording, and the limitations of reproduction, when the limitations of reproduction increases. If you watch the same movie on very different size tv's I think you will agree that each give a very different experience. For example, it's not easy to be scared by a horror film when the screen is 12".

Not to say I don't enjoy small speakers or small tv's, I actually have a $30 portable mono speaker I get as much enjoyment out of as quite more expensive speakers. And a 5" screen portable media player I enjoy a lot too :p. They certainly aren't hi-fi, but they have their charms.