The problem for the consumer is knowing when they're being fed BS about when dealers are blaming the recording or when it''s the stereo system that is causing the problem. When I fist started out I got fed the line "our speakers are so high in detail and resolution that it's telling you how bright and thin your album is." And gee it makes some sense in a way that something so "revealing" could reveal flaws in the recording while a less revealing system would cover over the cracks.

It is so logical that one usually accepts it as gospel. I remember a big high end dealer telling me my Amanda Marshal CD was total crap playing on his Cabasse and later B&W and Apogee Duetta Sig II loudspeakers because it was rather dynamically weak on two of them and rather bright on the B&W's. So file that album in the pile of garbage camp. Unfortunately for them, I later discovered that the album is quite well recorded and should sound rather excellent - lesson - it wasn't the album at all - it was their high priced overrated and bright or dynamically crappy systems that were the problem. And they dumped two of the lines because everyone walking in and listening, despite reviews, concluded the same damn thing.

Treble is the area that IMO tricks people because a well recorded album can still sound good on speakers that add grain and ringing. The additive isn't noticed as much on shorter duration listening but eventually it is IMO.

I first realized it when I compared two Standmount speakers - B&W was one the other was a boring box with a silk dome. I was playing a Barber classical piece - I can't recall it - I think it was the one played in Platoon. There is a busy crescendo with strings that goes very high into the treble. Very well recorded piece and what I noticed was the B&W reaching that peak with power but a very audible ringing. It wasn't very audible in isolation and not really noted as a problem UNTIL the other speaker was auditioned. The silk domed speaker went every bit as 'high" and had the power too but came without the surrounding fuzz. It was quite simply clearer and came from a blacker backdrop and basically had less of the etchy glare.

Keep in mind that at that time I was there to purchase the B&W N805 speakers - they were very high on my list along with the De Capo. The B&W is a speaker that dealers bring out the old "it's so revealing your CD's sound bad" accuracy claptrap. Yet the other speaker brought out the instrument - extended just as high you could hear the conductor's tapping, etc - all of the music attributes were there but without that spurious "what the hell is that noise" coming from the tweeters.

Perusing the website the tweeter design has an admitted ringing distortion that as you pay more and more for the next model up - they have bigger tweeters and longer tapering that reduces the ringing artifacts - they had it right there on the website!! And this is the biggest selling high end speaker brand on the market.

This problem is what I believe to be a speaker or system that "adds" grain which is mistaken for detail because when we hear "more" we assume that the more is supposed to be there when in reality the more is just added noise or grit that we never heard from live unamplified sources - I usually hear it incidentally from ribbon tweeters which are often described as being terrific treble producers but always seem to have a shhh quality of added artificial noise. So there is more treble but it's not heard in any live event. Classical composer and critic Leanoard Norwitz wrote about this artifact for enjoythemusic.com

"Detail And Resolution
We'd like to briefly examine one of the more interesting misperceptions common to audio critique. Many listeners speak of a playback system's resolving power in terms of its ability to articulate detail, i.e. previously un-noticed phenomena. However, it's more likely that what these listeners are responding to when they say such-and-such has more "detail" is: un-connected micro-events in the frequency and time domains. (These are events that, if they were properly connected, would have realized the correct presentation of harmonic structure, attack, and legato.) Because these events are of incredibly short duration and because there is absolutely no analog to such events in the natural world and are now being revealed to then by the sheer excellence of their audio, these listeners believe that they are hearing something for the first time, which they are! And largely because of this, they are more easily misled into a belief that what they are hearing is relevant and correct. The matter is aided and abetted by the apparentness of the perception. The "details" are undeniably there; it is only their meaning which has become subverted. The truth is that we only perceive such "detail" from an audio playback system; but never in a live musical performance.

"Resolution" on the other hand is the effect produced when these micro-events are connected.... in other words, when the events are so small that detail is unperceivable. When these events are correctly connected, we experience a more accurate sense of a musical performance. This is not unlike the way in which we perceive the difference between video and film. Video would seen to have more detail, more apparent individual visual events; but film obviously has greater resolution. If it weren't for the fact that detail in video is made up such large particles as compared to the micro-events which exist in audio, we might not have been misled about the term "detail", and would have called it by its proper name which is "grain". Grain creates the perception of more events, particularly in the treble region, because they are made to stand out from the musical texture in an un-naturally highlighted form. In true high-resolution audio systems, grain disappears and is replaced by a seamless flow of connected musical happenings." http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazin.../audiohell.htm

And the above goes to the B&W example earlier. One notices the "treble more and notices that there is an added level of brightness to Amanda Marshal's album that the treble of the acoustic guitar playing is bright leaning and thin sounding (also because the speaker doesn't have much bass so the ear is now really focussing on the treble). The fuller range standmount in direct comparison had a real bottom end and thus the ear could focus on the guitar box sound not just the strings and because the micro events were much better connected the treble extension remained in full but the added "grit" was removed, the ear has more range to focus on and all of a sudden what was supposedly a "bad" recording is now quite a solid recording - what was bad - were the three systems that made a good recording into a horrible one.

If 90% of your pop recordings sound bad it's your stereo system. I have hundreds of albums and most of them sound quite decent. Some don't. Some sound compressed as hell some have treble issues but they're in the minority and they still sound listenable. If you can't listen to your music and your stereo forced you only to listen to classical string quartets then your system sucks. Buy a new one. If AC/DC and Lady Gaga and Madonna's Ray of Light album sound like crap your system sucks - PERIOD.

Granted there are some speakers that thicken up the mix a little bit - vandersteen is an example - but on the whole this is favourable to the alternative. Decay is critical as is transients and 3 dimensional organic presentation of acoustic instruments. Cello and Piano and vocals are pretty much the first three things I listen to when making any evaluation on a system. If it can't recreate the full woody box sound of a Piano it's crossed off my list.

Anyway, systems that contrast recordings to the greatest degree are the systems that I generally like - a lot of speakers present a sameness and a washed out quality across a large number of recordings - they can still sound quite nice or good - but to me it's when a speaker makes all rock albums or hip hop or metal sound a certain one dimensional way is when it has problems - because some of these albums have HUGE dynamics and huge bass and midbass thwack - it's on the recoding and if the speaker system can't present it when it's there it is 100% the fault of the system not the recording. When one puts on the Evil Nine at 100db and the midbass is undistorted tight and can POUND then the system MUST produce this regardless of the technology. If it can't do this on comparatively compressed albums then there is no reason to assume it will be able to meet the dynamics or bass qualities of Beethoven's 9th.

Plenty of systems simply lie by omission - if you don't produce the bass and the dynamics then you "avoid" problems associated with resonances (speaker or room induced resonances) and this is why many seem to prefer small standmounts to big floorstanders or panels to big floorstanders. Big Floorstanders bring more problems because they tend to offer up a lot more bass, a lot more grunt and it causes room induced problems in that bass causes the boxes to resonate and the walls to become more noticeable. So throw the baby out with the bathwater - if we simply scale down the dynamics and hack of the bass then the problems (along with large chunk of what is on the disc) gets tossed out and we hear a clearer presentation that many find easier to live with. Until of course they can't and they usually wind up buying something bigger and bigger and bigger. Amplifiers do this to. It amazes me that some SET and amplifiers like some of the Sugdens really go down low into the bass and have a full rich bottom end and tight - while SS (supposedly superior) sound brittle thin and seem to have a frequency limiter. It amazed me that my Sugden A48b went down deeper on paradigm Studio 100 speakers while a Musical Fidelity with a much higher watt rating sounded as if the bottom end was truncated (in other words the amp itself sounded "compressed" and gee what do you know when listening to pop music the music sounded even WORSE than usual. You have a compressed album playing through a compressed amp and it's a math made in hell. You need the big dynamics of a classical album to make up for the pathetic dynamics of the big name expensive SS amplifier. Though the MF did sound more expansive in the left to right staging and had more "grain"' (air) added to the mix. Not heard in real life but whatever - it had more "sound" output even if it is fake.