How Many Of Us Are Compensating

No matter how elaborate, expensive or tweaked our systems get we are ultimately at the mercy of the sound quality of the music we purchase. The record producer, recording/mastering/duplicating engineers have set a hard limit on what can be retrieved from the recording media. Fortunately, the best recordings have a very high threshold as repeated equipment/set-up upgrades continue to discover additional levels of high fidelity sound. On the other hand, the average commercial recording can be quite pedestrian as far as sound quality goes. Over compressed, heavily EQ'd, non-existent soundstaging, etc... To what degree have you assembled your system and/or set it up in a way to compensate for the less than stellar sound quality of typical recordings? If you have "compensated", do you think what you did compromised the sound of the better made recordings?

As an example I have adjusted the toe-in of my speakers slightly more outward to avoid some objectionable upper midrange/lower treble hardness present on many modern recordings. Secondly, within the last year I've switched to a preamp with 7-band tone controls to deal with the really bad recordings.

BTW, I don't see compensating as a good or bad thing. I think it's far preferable to limiting what we listening to because it might not sound that good on our expensive toys.