Well, I am very, very pleased that I obtained Adele's album. Because, in the final round, it may end up being the "worst" album I own. And if I can rescue that, then I will really feel I've accomplished something.
What's fascinating is that I ran the album from the system being cold: as I've said many times, being a low quality dude the HT beast needs a good workout, a solid hammering to get everything, especially the speaker drivers up to scratch. And so far the messages I'm getting from this album have been confusing, it hasn't been like anything I've tried before.
So far my conclusions have been that the mastering engineers are obviously getting lower and lower into the audio signal, from each instrument, getting it as absolutely raw as they can. Then they start playing games with the sound, putting it back together again, just the way they want it to be. An analogy would be to create the perfect margarine, a perfect copy of butter, except that they believe they can make it better than butter! And the trouble is if you get it very, very close, but it's still not quite there ...
What appears to have happened with this album is that they have left nothing alone: everything, but everything is "fake". It has been put back together again to sound better than the real thing, but almost nothing in there is "real", for your ear/brain to grab onto and make sense of. Even, and especially, her voice.
Now I could be wrong, my system hasn't properly hit its straps yet. Maybe, just maybe, enough real sound, some tiny smidgeon, still exists somewhere in there to fool the brain, but I haven't hit it yet. In any case this disk could be the ultimate test CD: how a particular system handles it, makes sense of it, will tell you a huge amount.
Frank
What's fascinating is that I ran the album from the system being cold: as I've said many times, being a low quality dude the HT beast needs a good workout, a solid hammering to get everything, especially the speaker drivers up to scratch. And so far the messages I'm getting from this album have been confusing, it hasn't been like anything I've tried before.
So far my conclusions have been that the mastering engineers are obviously getting lower and lower into the audio signal, from each instrument, getting it as absolutely raw as they can. Then they start playing games with the sound, putting it back together again, just the way they want it to be. An analogy would be to create the perfect margarine, a perfect copy of butter, except that they believe they can make it better than butter! And the trouble is if you get it very, very close, but it's still not quite there ...
What appears to have happened with this album is that they have left nothing alone: everything, but everything is "fake". It has been put back together again to sound better than the real thing, but almost nothing in there is "real", for your ear/brain to grab onto and make sense of. Even, and especially, her voice.
Now I could be wrong, my system hasn't properly hit its straps yet. Maybe, just maybe, enough real sound, some tiny smidgeon, still exists somewhere in there to fool the brain, but I haven't hit it yet. In any case this disk could be the ultimate test CD: how a particular system handles it, makes sense of it, will tell you a huge amount.
Frank