audiophile recordings vs mainstream

Hi Listeners

I've been thinking about this a long time and don't think I have gotten around to talk about this (lately). Last night I went to my record store hoping to score and while there started thinking about all the different signatures recording companies have that separate their sound from everyone elses. This comes to my mind because of me spending time on Stereophile and seeing all the approaches to "fixed" tweaking instead of variable tuning.



I got home last night and went through some of my "audiophile" labels. I laid them out chosing random recordings by each of the companies I wanted to do this with. This was not an exact science, I grabbed the music blindly and know I left out tons and tons of labels but this was enough for me. I figured this way I would not be picking out my favorites and making this unfair.

GRP, RR, Telarc, Mapleshade, Shefield, Chesky, MoFi, Windham, Linn, Opus

I'm open to more but this is enough to prove my point. Here's also a survey by TAS http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/a-short-survey-of-audiophile-record-labels-tas-197-1/

I now need to turn toward the mainstream.

Warner, EMI, Atlantic, Capital, A&M, Columbia, RCA, Elektra, Ryko, Virgin

I was surprised as I came up with the list how many of these companies have ordered RoomTune in the past. That made me feel pretty good actually. Another thing that surprised me is that there were as many mainstream companies that have gotten RoomTune as audiophile ones. Hmm.... has me thinking. Are the audiophile companies as "audiophile" as we are lead to believe, or is this convenient marketing for smaller companies? Well I guess that's someone elses debate. When I look at these companies (all 20) I see different sound characters not one being better than the other. I have to be very honest here and say I could pick out one of my favorites out of everyone of these listed, but I would also have to say that some of them have flavors that do not ring my bell first listen through. I'm not talking content, I'm talking recorded technique. Fact is I could pick recordings from both camps and play them for you from a one system setting fixed to one of these recordings signature and put on another recording from a different camp and you would go "what happened?". I could easily do this and one the rcordings that did not sound so good you would hear a 3rd of the recorded info missing. Now at this point I'm rambling cause I really don't know how this is going to come out.

I'll go deeper here...but want to get you thinking about this. Time for some playing  

After a day of listening, I have to be fair and back up if I'm going to do this with an open mind, but it were based on todays listen Warner Bros & Opus Records would have ranked the highest with EMI close on their tail. This has got to be individual production and system setup that made these rankings cause the scores surprised even me.

So now I have to ask myself do I do what every audiophile does and run the music through the system without changing the system to match the recording? That's hard to do for me and very unfair, but isn't that what people do? They choose their recording based on the system instead of the music.

Scary