Dear Steve: My hi-fi has the wintertime blahs. It sounds lifeless, doesn’t image like it used to, and the bass is muddy—but I’m not sure if I’m just bored with the sound or need to make big changes.
Steve: I can’t say with any certainty what the cause of the maladies is, but it wouldn’t hurt to clean and check all of the line and speaker level connections. Clean every RCA or XLR plug/jack and your speaker cables’ spades/banana plugs with a Q-Tip moistened with cassette tape head cleaning solution. Of course, before you do any unplugging turn off the complete system, and while you’re at, clean the prongs of all of your AC plugs. Next, confirm that the polarity of all of your speaker connections is correct, at the amplifier and speaker ends: red (+) to red (+), and black (-) to black (-). If even one is reversed, imaging won’t be all it can be. I’d recommend performing this ritual twice a year, and if you’ve never done it, the improvements from a first time clean-up might be pretty dramatic. If the sound still isn’t up to snuff, upgrading your speaker or interconnect cables would be the next best hope to getting your sound back on track.
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Dear Steve: I’ve noticed that a lot of recordings only sound their best at a specific volume level. For example Livingston Taylor’s “Ink” CD sounds more realistic at fairly quiet volume, but the new Larry Coryell “Electric” disc is best enjoyed cranked up high. Why is this so?
Steve: You’re absolutely right, I find listening at what I imagine the natural volume level would be, the better the sound is. Acoustic music, like Livingston’s guitar and stand up bass aren’t all that loud in real life, and when you find that magic volume level that matches the natural sound of the instruments, the sound “locks in.” Larry’s Electric sessions were, trust me I was there, really loud. Drummer Lenny White wasn’t holding back one bit, and the bass and guitar amps were set to “11,” so the sound of the trio hitting the mic was perfectly balanced--there was no need for Chesky recording engineer Nick Prout to “mix” their relative volume levels. I have yet play that CD on a high-end system that can reproduce the levels I heard at the session, but Electric sounds better and better as I nudge the volume up. And since Nick didn’t compress the dynamic range of the instruments, you really feel their dynamics. Sadly, most of today’s commercial rock CDs have almost no dynamic range--their quieter, more subtle parts have been boosted in level, and the really loud, high impact sounds have been flattened, so the sound is always at the same level. But real music never sounds like that.
Steve Guttenberg is a regular contributor to CNET.com, Home Theater, Robb Reports-Home Entertainment, and Stereophile magazines.
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