Most pleasing sound vs most hifi sound

I think it has a lot to do with being preoccupied while listening. There's a lot to say about driving to the beach and playing tunes you love or twisting through the mountain pass while listenning to your prefered musical passage.

Sitting at home is just very different..perhaps clinical at times. I actually like reading, watching a ballgame (without sound on) or surfing the net (like right now) while I play music. It's the rarest of rare that I just sit and stare into space while listening.

Abucktwoeighty- You should feel sorry for those bikers. Generally speaking: The louder the pipes and the longer the front-end, the shorter the penis(it's a way of compensating). My neighborhood has it's share of noise too. I've installed 1/4" Lexan over my listening room's windows, which blocked about 80% of it. I listen at fairly stout SPLs too, which takes me to more pleasant places. What gets on my nerves are those little scooters without baffles that take 15 minutes to drag their sorry butts out of hearing range at full throttle. OH- I've always had dragpipes on my bikes too, but with partial baffles(nothing to compensate for).

Chris,

Did suggestions in this thread help - did you figure out why you like your some aspects of the sound from your car Grundig system (probably pretty darn good as far as car systems go) versus your home system?

Just curious - your threads often start and then digress and peter out with no resolution or closure...do you feel any different about your car sound now then you did a few days ago when you started this thread outof curiosity?

my tivoli bedroom radio/sub system attenuates treble freqencies in a smooth roll-off which seems to benefit the music coming over most stations.
i can even listen to classical music as long as it's not a large scale piece of music with everyone joining in at once.
jazz piano trios, acoustic bass, and especially vibraphones are very well reproduced. how a three inch speaker (with an admittedly huge magnet) and a 5 inch subwoofer can sound so realistic and textured is a total mystery. i still wonder what would happen if i knew how to modify this system with better interconnects and upgrade some of the internal parts. the power supply comes as a plug-in module, so it is isolated from the main chassis. i really think it has some potential, but for now it already sounds so smooth and unfatiguing i can listen to it for hours.

Hi Shadorne, I know why I like the car stereo. Not because it is extremely good (though it is not bad either), but because it gives more emotional bond between the music and you. It has to do with concentration: the more you concentrate on the music the more you hear things (that are synthesized by the brains) I guess. At home it is more of an experience because you simply hear more information, like the ambience information, soundstage and reproduction of the leading and trailing edge of notes. Because of this "overload" of information, the brains have to work harder to get this picture right and to let you believe that it is in fact a facsimile of the live experience. Whatever...

Chris