How do you keep yourself from flinging your system in a ditch?

[Ricci]

Yes, they do. They can change the sound of a system completely...

+1

IMHO any change to the sound from a set properly functioning and utilized set of cables will be incredibly minuscule and virtually indetectable. This is not to say that a cable cannot change the sound drastically, but the ones that do are coloring the sound whether engineered to do this, or not. If that's your kind of thing feel free. You'll get much more controllable and drastic changes through messing with speaker placement, orientation, trying a good EQ unit, adding room treatments, etc.

[tommyboy]

[8-|]

I mean, how do you keep yourself sane when listening to CD's (or whatever format you listen to) and the mixing is so different between each recording?

Newer CDs (e.g., Raphael Saadiq's "That's the Way I See It") have bass levels that are so pronounced that it actually knocked the kitchen clock off my wall (and the stereo is in the living room). Then I'll listen to say Earth, Wind & Fire's remastered "That's the Way of the World" and it sounds thin. Next, I'll put on Fleetwood Mac's remastered "Hits" album and everything sounds perfect.

I've had my Onkyo TX-SR706 for two months and I am still re-configuring it with nearly each CD. I'm going from setting the mains at 4-ohms to 6-ohms and back again repeatedly. I am setting the crossover on the mains to "full range" then changing it to 80, then to 60 then to 40 then back to full range. I'm turning the treble down then back to 0, then turning double bass on and off. Finally I get fed up and shut the God damned thing off.

I'm making myself nuts. You would think "Pure Audio" would fix all this and all it does is sound so thin I feel like I'm listening to a transistor radio.

How'd you guys find a setup that works satisfactorily through the differing sound outputs of varying recordings? Is it even possible?

I am trying to keep myself sane. For the love of God, help me.

My mains and subs are too heavy to me to fling them into a ditch!

[Islander]

And another question. I've got a Yamaha 663 receiver (which I know isn't the most expensive greatest one out there but its not terrible so please don't recomment replacing it with whatever super expensive amp/preamp combo) and when I go to "pure direct" it sounds like crap. Why?

Pure Direct switches off the input to the sub, so the sound in that setting will be clear, but a bit thin. I rarely use Pure Direct with my Yamaha receiver and almost always use the Straight setting when listening to 2-channel music.

[johnyholiday]

Bad software marginalizes good equipment

[Rhynri]

If you do not mind keeping your CD audio in lossless format (ogg, flac, alac, et cetera) there are a number of solutions for your problem. In my opinion keeping the media in a bit for bit copy produces the same sound as an already digital CD, but depending on your equipment and mentality, you may disagree.

So I write this for those who would will take it. Once you are running your audio through an intelligent system, as opposed to a "dumb" receiver (i.e. one that can not differentiate between tracks in any meaningful manner) you have many more options to combat this problem. One are solutions such as ReplayGain, which encode into the "tag" EQ settings so that upon next replay of the song, the program utilizing the approach will change their output to your last settings. These, being saved in the audio file, are kept even if the program goes kaput. Farther down the line, we have programs that can memorize in a database settings. And farther down the line you have the approach used by radio stations, which involves actively modifying the sound on a song-by-song basis to be equivalent to every other song. These can be had in a software/internal hardware/breakout box format, depending on who you are, how much money you can throw at it, and how hard you look.

Just a few cents from me.

My personal solution? Walk around with the remote. But I am a lazy, albeit wandering, scribe.