OK... I've been working on my speaker rig for the past six months or so. I just got an absolutely perfect combination of custom 1970s cabinet speakers, JBL towers, piezo electric supertweeters, top of the line Sunfire sub and Kilpsch center channel for the front end. (I still plan to upgrade the rears, but that's another story.) The sound is loud, full, detailed and clear, and the frequency response extends well beyond the range of human hearing in both directions. Most importantly, I've spent six months perfecting the EQ.
I've gotten to the point fine tuning using classical CDs where everything sounds perfect. It doesn't matter if it's Decca, DGG, Columbia or Naxos, it sounds perfectly balanced and natural. I also listen to a lot of historical music going all the way back to the early acoustic era and all kinds of classic jazz. When I put my music library on random play, every single thing... from big band records from the 40s to modern digital symphonic recordings... sounds *perfect*.
I've always subscribed to the theory that calibrating your sound to a flat response makes everything sound natural. That's why I've spend so much time and money on this speaker rig.
Yesterday, after I integrated my center channel and balanced it properly, I listened to my classical reference recordings carefully, and for the first time in a very long time, I didn't feel like I needed to make any corrections. I went through about ten recordings... chamber, orchestral, solo piano, opera... the best of the best and everything worked.
So I decided to go pull my old rock reference recordings. It's been a while since I listened to rock music seriously. When I was a kid, I had enough of it and wanted something different. I moved on and never looked back. But I wanted to check the CDs I used to set my tone controls back in the day. I pulled Donald Fagan's The Goodbye Look, Pink Floyd Welcome to the Machine, Led Zeppelin's Black Dog, David Bowie's China Girl, Frank Zappa's City of Tiny Lights, Beatles Norwegian Wood, etc.
When I started playing them, I had a shock. Not only were they imbalanced on my carefully EQed system, each one of them was off in a different direction. The exceptions were The Beatles Rubber Soul and Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti. Those two were spot on perfect. Donald Fagan's The Nightfly was pretty close. But Pink Floyd had grossly overpowering bass, David Bowie had no high end and a thick midbass, and Led Zep sounded like it had been recorded through a pillow.
I bounced through a bunch of other stuff and found a few more rock albums that were perfectly EQed at flat, but in general, it appeared that with most stuff the EQ curve had been goosed to sound better on small speakers. There was very little sub bass, a huge bump up in the mid bass, a great big sagging dip in the midrange and attenuated high end. Drum hits were flat sounding, vocals recessed, and the bass leaped forward, but only in the mid region. Below 80Hz and above 12kHz, there was next to nothing. It all sat in the middle.
Now I can see why people use headphones with shrill highs and loud midrange are used by people who like rock music. I used to have a set of cheap Sony cans that would be perfect with this stuff. But on full range balanced systems, this stuff really sounds like dog poop.
Another thing I found was that there was so much out of phase material in the mix, my DSP 7:1 stereo turned the rear channels to a bunch of mush. What sounded realistic and ambient with classical music sounded like oatmeal with rock.
I think in addition to the loudness wars, there is another back and forth war going on over frequency response. Engineers are thinking less and less about calibration and sounding good on good systems, and more about jerry rigging the response to compensate for the deficiencies of those lousy little satellite speaker systems, ear buds and cheap headphones. They don't want sub bass that will clip, or high end that will turn to a distorted mess... just the stuff in the middle that cheap transducers can handle. They compensate for the limited range by boosting the mid bass into a honky woof sound. With an equalizer, I could spend five minutes and make this stuff sound presentable, but since every single album is off in a different direction, I'd have to EQ for every album I play... perhaps every song. What a mess!
This appears to primarily be a problem with music post-Beatles. A good reason to go back to classical and jazz.
