Donald North Audio — Owners Thread

Doing some more listening, this combo is out of this world with well-recorded jazz trios, the material detail of piano, double bass, and drums is as if you could touch the instruments. Listening to "Your Good Lies" in "The Susceptible Now" (Aaron Diehl, Harish Ragavan, Tyshawn Sorey).

 

This feels a little weird to say on SBAF publicly, but do any of you have more recs for well recorded music that isn't stereotypical "audiophile fart around music"?

IDK why, but a lot of "not well recorded" music I like and enjoy on my other setups is just getting harder for me to properly enjoy without some degree of subconsciously nitpicking sonic flaws with the Stellaris now, especially when I use the Utopia.

 

One of my go-to albums: https://nilsfrahm.bandcamp.com/album/all-melody

 

I know exactly what you mean, so I'll take a shot at this

I don't know what genres you like, but the biggest factor in my opinion is whether the target audience is mainstream pop/rock/metal/hip-hop, etc. These are mastered to sound good-ish on earbuds & in cars, and we'll take what we can get on a decent playback system.

Blues (sorta), jazz, classical, etc. normally aren't figured to be heard on anything other than a decent home system, speakers or headphone. I happen to really like the blues; there's older stuff that might be on the rough or noisy side, but a lot of great stuff.
Try Clarence Brown/Long Way Home; pretty much anything by Guy Davis; The Chess Blues-Rock Song Book; Doug MacLeod/Come to Find
Jazz - Miles Davis/Kind of Blue
Tons of classical stuff out there

If those genres don't float your boat, it's a matter of listening & making playlists of stuff that is either pretty well produced; or just so good you'd be willing to listen to it anyway.
Stuff before 1990-ish seems to me to be less egregious; I love some 90's Brit Pop & US stuff, but wow bands like Oasis & The Stone Roses can really sound terrible.

Maybe if you describe what you like, others can chime in with relatively well-recorded songs or albums

 

I don't know your tastes in music, but anything produced by Trevor Horn will sound good (ABC, Yes, Seal, Propaganda, The Art of Noise, and so on), be well played, and ain't Yacht Rock. There's also a decent chance he played 5 string bass on it - he's a very good bassist, and the only person besides Chris Squire to play bass on a Yes record (Drama - Machine Messiah).

The first Frankie Goes to Hollywood album is one of my go to's for system tuning (and a master class in production) along with the original version of "Jolene" by Dolly Parton (24/96 remaster). Oooh, Lyle Lovett's "Joshua Judges Ruth" is amazing on every level (sound, production, songwriting, performance) - all killer no filler.

 

Similarly I immediately thought of Jon Hopkins “Immunity” & “Singularity” albums. I also like Tycho’s “Epoch” though the stage is revealed as flatish through DNA & Utopia level phones…