The Jester
1000+ Head-Fier
I never stated “compressed” as an outright but to my ears “overly compressed” and overly loud,I think the topic has been answered and this is arguably indirectly related to the topic. I’ve often heard audiophiles moan about compression, lambast those who apply it and demand recordings without any. The rationale being that more dynamic range is good, compression reduces dynamic range and causes the loudness war. So compression is poison, less is better, none at all is best. This is a faulty rationale, born out of ignorance, the actual rationale should be more like the rationale of oxygen; too much is poisonous and will kill you, but too little is equally lethal. There are exceedingly few recordings that would benefit from no compression, it is the most essential tool in the sound engineering arsenal next to EQ.
It is possible that the architecture/components are given more priority on “the balanced side over SE” and there are some examples of this. However, it would be quite rare for this to be great enough to cause audible issues. As is typical, audiophiles will ignore anything that might be perceptual error based and jump straight to some technicality which makes no difference that they can buy they way around (either with a more expensive audiophile product or an audiophile fix), while ignoring the actual facts. “In a well made system SE and balanced” do not sound the same, balanced is louder (typically 6dB) and also has slightly higher distortion, although not audibly more. And, a wider soundstage is a common perceptual side-effect/error of being louder.
G
I was responding to a request for anyone who’d heard the new album and was it worth buying .. I gave a personal opinion..
As an aside have you heard rhe Sweet song “Love is Like Oxygen” ..
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