This is your idea of perfection? Taking the original sound and synthesizing and adding stuff to it that the original artist did not intend to include?

True, but keep in mind that some of these audio enhancement technologies are meant to help properly reproduce what the artist intended. For example, the stuff that BBE does.

The whole idea is that between the time the artist lays down the master tape, and the time those sounds get to your ears, there are many steps in between. There's the mastering (which we all know can get butchered sometimes), there's the inherent differences between the artist's reference equipment and your playback equipment, there's the overall limitations of your playback equipment, and there's the limitations of your listening environment. These things can't always be corrected by equalization.

Little things like phase-correcting individual frequencies can go a long way towards restoring that "sitting at the mixing desk next to the artist" sound that everyone craves. Just hearing the difference between the original Hemispheres CD and the remastered version, you can understand what they're trying to accomplish with these technologies.

I'm not saying they're always successful, or that they're always the right technology for every situation, but taking a purist "don't ever post-process my sound" approach isn't 100 percent realistic, either.

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Tony Fabris