In general, I could say easily that versions Aleg likes are the best sounding in my system too.
+1
MQn should be developed to be a neutral and detailed player, to be the best a player can be.
This means on lesser hardware it will show flaws of that hardware.
+1
Interesting discussion going on. I think that claiming Aleg's camp likes their music "analytical", while Gordon's camp likes it "musical" is not exactly a reflection of how things really are imho.
Imagine the 100% perfect music player software. For the sake of argument, also imagine a system to play it on, say computer hardware, dac, amp and speakers, that is 100% perfect. What would that really mean? What would be its qualities? Analytical, detailed, musical? No, those are still subjective and therefore inherently "imperfect" qualities. The main quality of true perfection is absolute fidelity. What comes in, goes out. Now this kind of "perfection" would be impossible to measure of course, but let's say we would use our own ears.
The only way to even remotely approach the accuracy of our subjective measurement, is to play the kind of music that Aleg listed in one of his recent posts, acoustical musical instruments and human voice. And for even more improved accuracy, unmixed and unmastered, just two mikes for the recording. It's really hard to find recordings like that these days, but some from the 50's and 60's still exist. The sample I used for my binaural conversion comes to mind, Dave Brubeck's Take Five. That's the only music with an existing point of reference in our reality.
Amplified and electric/electronic music is created by circuit boards and sound engineers. There is no objective reference to judge the fidelity of the playback compared to the original. My point is, and I've mentioned this before, that playing Led Zeppelin or Coldplay as test tracks, makes it impossible for you to judge the fidelity level of your system, be it software or hardware. Even if you would have the perfect system and you would play rock with 2 different versions of MQn, all you'd be able to say is which one you like best. And that's on a perfect system. If you're listening to the motherboard audio output of your laptop on untweaked Windows, that would add another layer of imperfection, which could mean that in a very real sense, with MQn at the levels it has reached now, you will have no valid reference point at all to judge if a version has gotten closer or further away from perfection.
That's not snobbism, or wanting to show off how good our systems are. It's plain science. With a tweaked system like Aleg's that's very close to perfection, and the acoustical reference tracks he's using to test versions, he's in a much better position to judge if a version has come closer to that point of perfection or further away. That's what he means with neutrality, and yes, coming closer to perfection, all the sub-qualities of music reproduction are getting "better" as well: detail, timing, PRAT, musicality, tonality, decay, you name it. Using Led Zeppelin on your laptop output to judge if a version of MQn is good or not, is like a wine connaisseur eating hot chilli just before he takes a sip of the finest of red wines to test it. He might really enjoy a nice bottle with his chilli, but he's no longer in a position to judge its quality. A bottle of Tesco value might make him feel just as good as the best Chianti. :-) That's just the way things work! It's nothing personal...
Oh and ...
I wish Gordon would provide a selection of the versions that people currently are happy with to allow
hires files be played.
+1
That would be brilliant!
