GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Listening rooms and composers.

Post Subject: Bruckner as the final testPosted by jp on: 6/3/2010

"When I moved my system and was just learning the new room and making changes, I was also listening to more Bach than usual. I mostly wanted to play Partitas, Inventions, Preludes, and Goldberg Variations. I was turned off by any cello work (which is terribly unusual for me), concertos, fugues, and WTC.

The system at that time was only pleasing with "typewriter music." Now that the speaker placement is nearly final, time-alignment is done and I am finally getting tone and imaging, I am playing more Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Dvorak, Liszt, and Mussorgsky. I haven't tried Bruckner, but Haydn, Mozart, and a few others are unattainable at this point. Of course, I'm not sure exactly is going on, but I think that the room and system is obviously more capable of rendering rhythm and time readily (suiting music that is meaningful in these ways), whereas music whose meaning is more dependent on tone, timber, space, and so on just doesn't feel "right" or even comfortable without the proper ingredients."

Ive only had experience with one room for any length of time but I can identify with the experiences of LBJ and Romy. I could not bear to listen to Bruckner when my system was somewhat out of sorts while conducting experiments in my system. Listening to Bruckner in a less than ideal state, I felt impatient and somewhat annoyed and mentally fatigued. It was nearly impossible to get at or into Bruckner. I had a much more enjoyable time listening to it on my portable cd player.
In my attempts to locate the DPOL, I would use certain concertos and solo pieces to nail down the imaging but often times the sound/presentation was completely unsatisfactory when I changed to more sophisticated symphonic pieces such as Bruckner. Quite frustrating and maddening. So now when I do any sort of experiments I pretty much use Bruckner as my final test in evaluating my system.

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