TAD speakers, Pass Labs amplifications, EMMlabs digital

The source material played in this room was fine, though the gunshots and percussion do not tell one anything about the quality of a system as they are the easiest of sounds to reproduce. The recorders and recording process also seems to be state-of-the-art.

The source equipment in this room was also top-notch.

Our problem with this room was with the sound. For those of you who did not get to hear this system this system had a sound like the midrange of the Wilson Audio Watt / Puppy V but with even more emphasis verging on distortion. There was also a total lack of separation and complex musical passages collapsed into a nasty hash. Then add a flabby, uncontrolled bass and stir.

We listed this as a "Room One Might to Avoid" because it was fatiguing and caused our ears to shut down. Cause the ears to shut down enough times, and for long enough, and they won't want to relax and open up to let in the good sound in that the next room might have.

Actually, if the ears are subject to enough bad sound, over a long enough period, it may take months if not years for them to open up and 'trust' that the sounds you are going to subject them to are not going to cause them to cringe in pain and shut down again. In fact, it may get to the point where the listener may not even know their ears are shutting down automatically whenever they see a hi-fi system. I should know. I played lots of CDs in the early '80s, and not very softly at that!

One can see that vibration control in this room is not a high priority. Would a real amplifier platform and a real equipment rack help address the problems in the sound that we heard? Let's see:

• Overly hot midrange? No.
• Congestion, lack of separation and inability to handle complex passages?  Yep.
• Loosy goosy, disconnected bass? Yep.

There is a myth held by some in the audiophile community that for music to sound real it must sound brash, bright and aggressive. Yes, some (badly engineered) studio monitors and (badly engineered) stage amps and cabinets sound like this - but their job is in large part to either spotlight various parts of the music so that a studio magician can hear everything that is going on, or to make noises loud enough to impress the owners of the bar so that the musicians will get paid.

Yes, most audiophile systems are compressed, softened reproductions of the real thing to assure that the music sounds pretty no matter what problem pieces are in the reproduction chain and no matter what the source. This has largely been a trend for just the last few decades, largely attributable to the digital glare of CDs and the available large wattages of solid-state amplifiers. Many agree this is a trend whose time has come and gone.

There are in fact high-end systems out there, at every price point, that in fact do attempt to reproduce the real thing. Not ear-bleeding and not muffled. A real orchestra does not sound brash and in your face - in fact, in a good hall, it is amazingly rich and warm. Yeah, some music does attempt to be aggressive, in pursuit of their message, and that is as it should be. But not every piece of music is necessarily intended to appeal to those with teenage (and 20 something... and 30 something... and middle aged) male angst - and to tell the truth, on a good guitar amplifier, such as that used by most rock stars these days (most great amps cost around $2500, and price no object amps are $14K), it is darn near impossible to make a guitar sound 'bad', no matter how loud and how much time the signal spends in the digital domain getting the appropriate heaping amounts of distortion added.

So to say that a system must sound more real because it has so much detail and has such a hot midrange (not to mention the congestion and unevenness)... that is just so wrong, at least in the opinion of this hi-fi system builder.

Tascam DV-RA1000 DSD tape player / recorder

Pass Labs X350.5 monoblock amplifier