Hi Chris
Your follow up is interesting and is pretty much in alignment with my stars
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I actually do have a few 12” vinyls which sort of fit into the style of music you listen to ie. Ege Bam Yasi, Finitribe, Nobody, T:Me 0792 - Various which I picked up from a pile of presumably a DJ collection in a Hospiscare. They all have imo been mixed very well, they do have some serious bass, one reason I enjoy listening to them. The system as a whole reproduces them well and enjoyably, it may not be gut wrenching feel it in the stomach like you possibly would in a club, but then I don’t have 1000w amps and stack of 15” drivers with massive bass bins, I think the neighbours in close would complain if I did.
I take your point about electronically mixed and computer generated music, you really are at the mercy of how the producer mixed it and what/where he was listening to it when he did so. I believe some even go to large clubs/venues to do a mix so they know it will hopefully sound similar in a similar venue in the future, so in this instance I doubt any of us will get close to what was intended with our home systems.
I think this is also very true of live music, for example let’s take a classic Deep Purple - Made in Japan, widely recognises as one of the better live rock albums of all time. It is in fact a favourite of mine and I was listening only yesterday. There are several issues with replay, to get the scale and sense of auditorium acoustics you have to play it pretty loud imo, pushing over 90dB, and that’s probably not loud enough, although the neighbours certainly won’t like it. Then there is the dynamics of the band, the feeling of the mic’d up kick drum pounding out over the stack sound system, the bass guitar pumping out those famous rhythms, I think you get it what I am saying. So no matter how good I think it sounds, it really is not going to replicate the actual live performance, no matter how good the transcription of it or the quality of the system it is played on. IMO when I listen to something like this I am getting a representation of what was actually recorded, and the feeling and ambience of what I hear is what I enjoy, as well as the musical content. Similarly I think reproducing the scale and grandeur of a full symphony orchestra in full flow is a major challenge to achieve, just listen to Prelude (Sonnenaufgang) Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, there is huge scale and dynamics with massive low bass at the end form the organ, often completely lost when replayed on many systems, also recording/mixing quality varies greatly affecting replay.
So what I am trying to say is that bit is not just your particular taste in genre that is affected. In my personal view I have found that if you pick pieces of music to tune your system that have clear well recorded and easily identifiable REAL instruments then you will get the best from you system.
I use some Jazz (piano, trumpet, drums, upright double bass) Miles Davis - So What(Kind do Blue), Bach Organ music, Eva Cassidy -Fields of Gold and other tracks(I include her voice as an instrument), a good rendition of Vivaldi Four Seasons, a good recording of Beethoven’s 5th symphony. If I am happy with these then I listen to some favourite rock/pop music, 10cc - Worst Band in the World, Supertramp- School, Sinéad O,Conner - Feel So Different, Paul Simon - The Boy In The Bubble, Peter Gabriel - The Rhythm Of The Heat, Ravi Shankar- Tala Rasa Ranga(Portrait of Genius), St Germain - Rose Rouge. I know all these very well, what I mean by that is I can hear the music in my head without it being played if that makes sense, so when I listen to them on my system I known, or think I know, what it should sound like,mat least for me.
Having set up my system and listened to system changes using the above I have “tuned” it to my liking, as a result I have found that it seems to work well across all genres, although I recognise that very low bass below 35-40hz is not going to happen unless I add a good sub.
You might want to have a listen to some of the tracks above if you are not familiar with them, you may find them interesting, albeit some a bit old school.
Cheers Adrian