cerchiamusic's system

No, I never was into bluegrass growing up. Having more of an appreciation now for that style music and alot of country's roots in celtic! Have you heard the "Goat Rodeo Sessions" album with Yo Yo Ma? Love that album.
Sort of combines classical, jazz and country and makes it a progressive 4th style altogether.

Hi Rick

"Goat Rodeo Sessions" is awesome 

Ever since Drewster turned me on to "Nickel Creek" I've been loving their music as well. If you don't have any you might like them.

Got a few Norman Blake records -- great bluegrass guitar work. Try his "Old and New" with tracks such as Bristol in the Bottle and Billy Gray. Sonic used to think that bluegrass was a folk music form that was relatively ancient to the 19th century. Turns out it is a relatively recent musical form dating to just before or after WW2.

Went to a high end store today that actually sells Paradigm speakers. Tried a couple CDs on their system. I heard the same distortion there I heard at home. I am depressed. The Funai comes Friday. We'll see what happens.

Don't worry, we'll walk through things and see what we can find.

I wonder what if the source was analog. But the Funai may be the solution.

The Funai came today. I hooked it up before doing anything else to it, just for curiosity sake.
The distortion was awful! Playing Bruckner 9th through it was ridiculous. I will try to adjust it the way you indicated, later. I have rehearsal in an hour. I wish you were here to hear this....
Playing the Bruckner 9th through the Cambridge again right now....yuck.....its like when you leave the snares engaged on a snare drum and brass or something loud plays near it....you hear the snares when those other instruments get loud.

Good

I'm glad you got it. Keep it playing as it is going to take some time to start breaking in. We'll want to start going through your system soon but I need you to get the player broken in some first.

I have a question for you. Do you turn your system off when you are gone?

Also I'm going to need to take a look at your place and the way things are set up there before long.

  I didn't need to be there to hear it   I've heard the FUNAI do surprising things out of the box at many places so nothing shocks me. We need to start getting you a little familar with tuning so you can make changes in the sound on your own then report them.

you'll get their

I've been using the DVD player...it works ok for movies...sound isn't great.
Have not done any adjustment to it. Not that technically enclined. I'll have a techi type friend do it.
Can't believe the garbage I'm hearing audio wise. A sound engineer I had contacted a while back told me that there shouldn't be any difference in the string sound to the rest of the recording. NOT what I'm experiencing.
Maybe my ears are defective. Nobody else seems to hear what I do. Its depressing. I posted his email below.
His name is David Bowles.

Just finished a run with a High School group of "Seussical'. They did a fantastic job! I also had a small pit of 6 professional musicians...so that helped alot too....

I will try to post something mid May probably.
Blessings

Rick Cerchia

From David Bowles
Dear Richard:

The D/A (digital-to-analogue) converter chip in your CD player might be partially responsible for the harsh sound. The room could also be contributing to the high-frequency buildup, particularly if there are windows and shiny floors. I got my editing room "tuned" acoustically recently and it made a huge difference - see my Facebook page for Swineshead Productions, LLC.

There should be no reason that strings in particular would sound harsh in comparison to chorus, flute/oboe or trumpet sound. Many of these recordings were done with "simple array" techniques where 2 or 3 mics were responsible for most of the signal (with spot mics used only for a little emphasis here and there). However, some of those mics in "classic" recordings of the 50s-70s DO have a rise in high-frequency response. This dates from the early days of analogue tape, due to most people's playback systems back then (and also excessive high-frequency loss in early noise-reduction processes).

All too often, when analogue tapes are mastered for CD release, the sound is reproduced exactly as it was heard on the tape. This does not take into account the additional processing the LP mastering engineer applied when cutting a master - the RIAA equalization curve, summing low frequencies to the centre (to prevent the needle from jumping out of the groove), and other wizardry at their discretion. This can explain why some LPs sound "smooth" and CDs of the same recording "harsh". Early CDs DID have poor A/D (analogue-to-digital) conversion, and the players were not that much better. That has changed over the years - hopefully your present CD player has "oversampling" as well as high-quality circuitry...

I hope this helps. In the mean time, please check out my website for the latest recordings and reviews!

Yours sincerely,
David Bowles

Hi Rick

It would be important to look at the system at this point.

Based on the posts, I'm not getting much of a picture of what is going on there.

thanks