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I don't quite understand your sentences, but this is what I'm thinking:

- favorite CD in crappy boombox = great, enjoyable, why else is it my favorite CD?!

- favorite CD in high-end CD player with similarly high-end interconnects, amp, and headphones ($$$) = great, enjoyable, it's still my favorite CD, but now that my equipment resolves all the details of the recording (in effect "extracting" all possibilities out of the recording with a minimum of coloration; an "ideal" digital if you will), it turns out the CD sounds bad (recorded poorly)

- therefore, spend more $$$$ to color the signal ("dumb" it down, mask the deficiences) = fun (also funny)

As I said before, turn it up, it's your favorite CD, enjoy the music. Jeez, I still get a major kick (and chills) listening to Robert Johnson, whose recordings are lo-fi at best.

I don't think that is what people are saying. There are different types of hi end systems. Absolute resolution is not always the best thing in a cd player. There are extremely good cd players that are neither colored, nor super detailed nor cd boomboxes. My old conrad johnson dv2b was an example of this. It is just musical in a way that a cheap player usually isn't.

edit: But I should say that you shouldn't expect to have a source make a bad recording sound good. I listen to tons of bad recordings -- robert johnson like you, as well as Pablo Casals or even Rachmaninov playing his own pieces. But just because you have bad recordings does not mean you should have a bad cd player.

My feelings are that there is a midpoint to the whole deal. If you spend too much money on gear, you start to focus less on the music and more on the sound. That is, you pick apart the music from each moment rather then listening to the peice as a whole. I've got a friend who's a music major, absolutly loves music in every form. I've tried to convince him to buy nice stuff for ages but he has never given in. He's listened to a lot of nice stuff (not really headphones, more on the lines of speakers) and enjoys it, but he has no problem going back to crappy headphones and a crappy pcdp. Why? Not because he can't tell the difference, but because it doens't matter to him. He knows exactly what the music is supposed to sound like, most of the time he's already played it or heard it played, and what's coming into his ears is secondary to the enjoyment he gets from just hearing it.

My two cents, and the reason I'll never spend a ton of money on this stuff.

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Statements like these are completely untrue. The better the gear I've been able to purchase, the more I have enjoyed the music. Thats the reason I have tried to climb up the audio latter in terms of quality gear. To think that people who own good gear don't sit back and enjoy the music, and only pick apart every recording is ridiculous. I wouldn't put to much faith in someone's opinion who thinks owning good gear causes lack of music enjoyment.
I would also rather listen to horrible recordings through very good gear than through poor or average stuff. Even though I can hear the poor production parts clearer, the music on a whole is still better. That said, I love listening to music through whatever resources I have at the time. But saying it doesn't sound better through top notch gear....... would not be true.

Have to agree with tom hankins on that one. It's all about being able to enjoy it more, not less.

I dont thats what he was trying to say. Read it again, and you will see he is trying to say that his friend knows the difference between high end systems and low end ones, but he still enjoys the music through all of them. He tries to focus on the music rather than trying to analyze how it sounds.

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Read the first three sentences again. Frenchman states what his feelings are about spending money on high end gear. I don't know anyone who enjoyed listening to music less as they upgraded there system. I understand fully that someone might not care if they listen to music through one level of gear or the next.(his friend)
But to say that high end gear leads to picking apart the music instead of hearing the music as a whole is wrong.

well I have no hi-fi stuff, any of this great headphones, amp, soundboard, cables... and I feel so good, relaxed, enjoing the radio music - perfect

GOOD give me some moneyyyyy....please

That was a fairly inaccurate blanket statement, you're right. So I'll qualify that with "this happens to some people." In any case though, I'll still maintain that the quality that comes into your ears is secondary to the music itself. And I never said that it DIDN'T sound better through higher end gear, though I'm sure there are times when higher end gears reveals some truely horrible parts of a recording and actually makes it sound worse. That's neither here nor there though. It undoubtably sounds better in the vast majority of circumstances, and I never said it didn't.

What I was saying is that, from reading a lot of posts on this board, a lot of people who end up spending a lot of money on gear end up getting away from the point of music. Every time I hear "this is totally unlistenable" it makes me wonder why they're still listening to music. They're obviously not listening for the music, otherwise they wouldn't care what they were hearing it through. Therefore that means they're listening for the reproduction of a infinate series of voltage transforms. That just seems to be getting away from the whole purpose of headphones, that is, to listen to music.

I hope that explains where I'm coming from a bit clearer. Don't get me wrong, I'll be buying from gear at some point. But this was a response to the very first post, and if what happens to him starts happening to me, I'll definatly have to stop buying stuff for a very long time.

Well, the whole purpose of this board is to discuss headphone-related *equipment*, so it shouldn't be surprising if that's what people are talking about. I think you'll find in general people here have much larger music collections than the average person and spend far more time listening to music than the guy on the street. Seems to me, you don't invest heavily in expensive, esoteric gear if you don't have a fundamental love of music.

For example, I don't like cooking, so it would make little sense for me to invest in lavish kitchen equipment, funky utensils, expensive pots and pans, exotic spices, and what not, let alone spend all my free time hanging out at marthastewart.com message board finding out about the latest and greatest skillet.

if you don't want to change your system around to suit your crappy recordings, theoretically the best solution is to remaster the bad recordings yourself to make them sound good out of your current system...

a bit of EQ and other simple tweaks on the sound editor ought to take care of most problems...

I really ought to take my own advice and start de-essing those old Leon Lai CDs...

Here is a spin-off thread started by Joe Bloggs over in the Member's Lounge that reacts to the topics above.

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I agree tom.

But many do.