How can I make bad recordings of favorite music listenable?

[Aerocraft67]

I've assembled a modest entry level desktop listening station (Synology 212j NAS, ALAC files, MacBook, iTunes, BitPerfect, Dragonfly, Sennheiser HD-650) and re-ripped much of my CD collection to a lossless format using XLD ensuring good rips. Now I've discovered that several of those CDs sound terrible at satisfying volume, probably due to compression, as I encounter this on indie and classic rock (although I may find it in other genres, too). I acknowledge the principle of high fidelity to the source, but the sound in some instances is sufficiently unpleasant to justify violating this principle. Some of these bad recordings are of my favorite music, with no superior recorded alternatives to the CDs I own, and I want to enjoy them as much as I can. What can I do? Insert an equalizer into the stream? Where? Hardware or software? How can I easily toggle it off for the good recordings? Although I enjoy tweaking and customization as much as the next guy, I actually wouldn't mind a default setting that addressed the presumably common harshness I'm encountering. The goal here is to enjoy the music, not add another component to obsess over. Not that I mind obsessing over components.

[Boris75]

I would suggest that you look for alternative releases of these CDs: mobile fidelity sound lab (MFSL) CDs, analogue productions SACDs, Japanese SHM CDs and SACDs, DCC gold CDs to quote the ones I have personally found most helpful.

 

If you go down this route, be prepared to have to spend time and pay top dollar to get these second-hand as quite often these special editions are out of print and expensive in the second-hand market (eBay and Amazon marketplace are the main places to look). Welcome to audiophile land.

[Blake]

This a problem for many of us. Drawing an analogy to high def television- I remember being so excited when I purchased my first HD TV. Got it home, turned it on to a non-HD channel and "blah..... what the hell is this?!!"

 

Sometimes you don't really want to dig deeper into the details.

 

Alot of my favorite music consists of mediocre to truly bad recordings. In certain cases, and it depends on the album, I just don't listen to my XLD rips of the CD. Rather, I listen to it in a lower rez format, usually streaming from MOG.

 

The other option to consider is to purchase something like a Peachtree Nova, which has a selectable stereo triode 6N1P tube designed to "smooth the harsh electronic edge found in bad recordings and compacted audio". I have no personal experience with this unit but I am sure others that own the Peachtree or similar product can chime in.

[bleedink]

A gentleman who frequently posts on the site and runs a web site Signalyst (hoping I have this correct) has had apparently good results upsampling his redbook recordings to DSD128. Most DACs will already be doing this in some form anyway to do just what you wish to accomplish by adding a filter after doubling or quadrupling the original sampling rate. I liken this to the filters I use as a graphic artist. I can take a painting that was photographed at a 45 degree angle under glass with a flash taken with an iPhone and at first glance turn it into a print ready portrait. A casual glance would reveal nothing abnormal about the photo. A closer look (similar to critical listening) will reveal a Gaussian nightmare of blurry versus pixelated disasters. It appears to polish the proverbial toilet dropping, but the more you look and the closer you pay attention the less you would be fooled by the illusion. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it does show that there's only so much that can be done with what isn't there to begin with. That said, there are others here that have some very interesting ways to squeeze better sound from what they have.

[Paul R]

+1 for Bleedink - try some of the high end audio programs, like Pure Music and Audirvana+, and see if upsampling or the filtering built into those products can make the disks listenable. Or just play stream it to an iPhone or iPad and listen with headphones from those devices.

 

Seriously?

 

I use both of those trick on some music. _The Best of Spanky and Our Gang_ has a lot of fun music on it, but the recording is so bad that I will be deleting it off the disks... ;

[AudioDoctor]

It is what it is. Sadly.

[Bob Stern]

Try parametric EQ with a notch filter at around 3500 Hz.

 

Pure Music can host the parametric EQ plugin built into OS X. Some people report commercial parametric EQ plugins, such as FabFilter, are higher quality. (I haven't compared plugins because my DAC has parametric EQ in hardware DSP.)

[baxtus]

I agree with Bob Stern - judicious "tone control" can make a horrid album listenable.

 

Also, listen to the offending album in isolation to other recordings (ie not directly after a stunningly lovely recording). The ear-brain interface can do marvelous compensation tricks.