Sunderwood writes:
I have heard recordings where the engineer had everything in your face. The guitar was so overdriven that you would have thought the amp was broken. One example is the latest Journey album Freedom. I bought it on cd when it first came out. The guitar is as I described and everything is cluttered. I thought about getting the vinyl version of it, but I wouldn’t want to do that without an assurance that the sound is better lest I wind up wasting my money.
Fatrat writes ...
In 45 years of home-audio, listener fatigue for me only occurred more recently, when I owned a pair of Klipsch – ‘RP-160M’ standmounts.
I very much suspect that it was because of the titanium/aluminium horn tweeter.
It was a damn shame really because I loved their detail & punch…after 8 months I had to sell them.
I believe that the brain can be trained & I have been listening to 2 channel home-audio since I was around seven years old, mono before that.
The Ditton 66 floorstanders that I owned for nearly 38 years improved in sound, clarity, detail & punch, going from vinyl to CD in 1985 – 1987 & finally, in 2009, improved in SQ again when being driven by an early, quality ‘D’ class amplifier with two big power supply transformers.
There was something inherently smooth yet still incredibly detailed in Celestion’s design of their HF 2000 & the MD-500 (dome midrange) that never allowed them to sound harsh or fatiguing under any circumstances.
Currently, with my DeVore – ‘Orangutan O/93’ floorstanders I have to be careful what source I’m using, as to whether they become fatiguing to my ears or not.
I would say that currently I’m just under the limit using my Marantz – ‘CD6006’ CD player, however, if I switch it up to my Marantz – ‘SA12 SE’ SACD player, which converts everything to DSD, then I’ve gone just over the limit & some CDs, not all, that I play in said ‘SA12 SE’ do sound etchy & thus can become a bit fatiguing to listen to CDs through.
The thing that became fatiguing for me back in the vinyl days were the pops & clicks & general surface noise of the substandard Australian pressings…of course that was a different type of fatiguing 😉
I have worked in Hi-Fi retail long enough to understand that no home-audio set-up is ever going to be perfect…as PM sometimes likes to say that “There are no free lunches”…& so realistically I’ve always been ab advocate for some compromise
Similar with me, FR. I never experienced listener fatigue with my analog stereo systems independent of the – carefully selected – loudspeakers involved. And never any fatigue with the former mono systems, of course. However I experienced a lot of CDs which forced me to push the STOP-button even after several seconds. I rather believe that listening to stereo – meaning two sound-sources (loudspeakers with multiple drivers) which are claimed to produce a phantom image and a clear center image (for the latter the pioneers of stereo favored a dedicated center channel based on a 3-channel recording) – is a huge stress-factor for our ear-brain system being forced to do a lot of processing in order to create these phantom images based on aural illusions/brain-fooling. The more drivers involved not being absolutely identical the more stress for our brain! When I started to optimize my stereo system for XTC (cross-talk cancellation) requiring near perfectly identical channels I noticed that I could relax much better listening to music when XTC was activated although the majority of tracks weren’t recorded based on ambiophonic concepts.
JW writes ...
I picked up a CD of Steve Winwood’s “About Time”…
Great production, awesome music. And most of the tracks are so good, I hate to be the critic.
On a few tracks, the mic’ing and/or mixing spoil it so badly that one wonders if Steve insists on over-amping the Leslie on his organ, or is the engineer was too high or had hearing loss.
When the Leslie kicks in it hurts my ears and brain.
Too bad – one of his best releases.
I have a remote with a tone on/off, and have just set the treble to reduce the irritation some.
