[SoulSyde]

OK, I'm obviously speaking in jest here.  As the quality of my headphone/amp/DAC equipment has improved so has my tendency to listen to certain albums (and even genres) of music.  Looking back, my taste in music recently has leaned towards those albums/tracks that allow me to flex the audiophile-muscle of my various components (car and workout listening excluded here).  Tracks with low background noise, well mic'd, well produced and excellent instrument separation.
 
Then I found myself listening to my iTunes library on random this evening and I made a startling realization....
 
So much of my older music sucks.
 
The unfortunate thing about owning a fantastic setup is realizing that I need to step up my bit-rate game.  I'm not the kind of "golden ear" nut that can decipher the difference between 320kbps and ALAC/FLAC but anything near 160kbps sounds like crap.  The challenge is that a lot of my Hip-Hop, Electronica, Mash-Up and live music is not available anywhere at a higher bit-rate than I already have.  More interestingly I can tell which of my older CDs have really crappy engineers.  Some of these albums even in 320kbps sound absolutely awful.  Well, 1st World problems I guess... I'll have to "suffer" through this world of mediocrity. 

 

 

[CantScareMe]

Yep. I reckon quite a few have had a similar experience when first meeting audiophile gear.

 

[SoulSyde]

I've been in this audiophile game since '08 so I guess I'm surprised I'm having this epiphany now.  Maybe I'm a creature of habit with my listening trends. 

 

[CantScareMe]

Oh right. Surprised it took so long!

 

[moriez]

I hear you SoulSyde. After upgrading my gear this year it became so obvious that some albums aren't a pleasure to listen to anymore. You'd think, easy solution and get a FLAC rip but it really isn't about bitrate or format in 99% of the cases but the recording itself. I think the worst sounding in my collection was Clams Casino instrumental mixtape which you probably know. Good music but utter utter crap over headphones. Eventhough it's just a mixtape it wasn't that apparent over speakers. So what's happening is a shift in preference of albums to listen to. There's some fine recorded music out there and those now sound double rewarding. We win some we lose some. I like these changes. It's a new dimension to the music (hobby) you know and love.

 

[AHorseNamedJeff]

I cant listen to hardly any Mötley Crüe CDs anymore because the mastering is so bad...

 

[SoulSyde]

  So what's happening is a shift in preference of albums to listen to.

 
That's exactly what's happened to me over the years.  I have been favoring the quality of the mix and engineering quality over the content.
 
As I'm starting to rediscover some of my older "gems" the challenge is to locate better quality (i.e. remastered) recordings of those works.