Talk but not walk?

My car, really most any stock car audio system, helps make all kinds of poor recordings sound decent. My car is not tuned to these poor classic rock recordings etc... No, the fact is there is a sameness that a stock car audio system impacts on all recordings so they all sound decent. Is this fidelity to the actual recording? No. Far from it.

What are we after with our home audio systems? Homogenized sound that allows us to play objectively poor recordings well? Perhaps or perhaps not?

"My car, really most any stock car audio system, helps make all kinds of poor recordings sound decent. My car is not tuned to these poor classic rock recordings etc... No, the fact is there is a sameness that a stock car audio system impacts on all recordings so they all sound decent. "

In all honesty this is what i expereinced too.

Over the years I have been pondering why is it that some of my recordings sounds just plain and un-ivolving but when I play it in my car it sounds simply amazing or decent. I started off this hobby from car audio and slowly went into home audio. Now I would not place my self as a car audio freak but I did get an amp and changed the head unit. The amount of money I have invested in my home audio is way more than what I spent in my car. Unfortunately playing the same recording just does not justify that amount of money I spent.
Thats what got me all sparked up on searching for an answer which lead me to Michael Greens website. Going through his website made me think differently and made me realize that its not all about your equipments, speakers and cables. To get a good sounding system is not about how expensive or best sounding equipments that have won major awards. Nor how famous a particular brand is that some may swear upon it. But its about tuning and getting whatever system you have to fit in better with your surroundings.

As I started my journey taking Michaels advise I began to see and hear more into those recordings. More information was I able to gather, more involvement and finally more passion towards this hobby. Which ultimately got me thinking seriously into building my own dedicated room. Before this my system was placed in my living room. What never changed was my equipments that I have invested previously but what has tottaly changed was my mind set in this hobby.

Now if i had know this earlier would i have still bought my expensive setup well no. I would have got something more functional and enough to power my speakers and load my room up with music and tune the hell out of it lol!

Why wouldn’t car stereos sound very good? They are battery powered, the speakers have no complex crossovers, there are no real “room acoustics issues,” the car is isolated from seismic vibrations by a pneumatic isolation system (shock absorbers) and the CD player buffers the data.

I'm lucky to be on a budget--after a few thousand dollars, my hands begin to shake, I feel very unhappy, and all music sounds crappy to me.  Therefore, I cannot test whether a $10,000 amp sounds 'better' than my $500 ones.   But (at least back when stereo stores existed), I could compare various components in admittedly flawed tests (as close to 'single-blind' as I could get), either in the store or at home.  Thus I was able to reject things where I could hear no difference (cables, etc.).  Of course psychology plays a large part (as does, alas, progressive hearing loss)--but since I'm doing the listening, it doesn't matter what is objectively better.  If the tube-glow makes the sound 'more warm' to me, fine.  Also, the room environment (high wooden ceilings vs. 8' apartment stucco, speaker placement) makes far more difference than any equipment I can afford.  

That said, I am a firm believer in single/ or double blind studies, which should be used for audio whenever possible.  I don't think you can really test 'good sound' vs. 'bad sound' that way, but you can certainly test (1) whether there are objective sonic differences, and (2) whether those sonic differences are detectable by human ears.