Been some talk about new product demos lately. Actually, a lot of talk.

First things first - what are you listening to?

Mastering engineers (professionals with amazing ears who make a living polishing up tracks for CD's) will tell you that 95% of the systems people listen to are utter crap. And they're right.

Bob Katz, in his book "Mastering Audio", even goes so far as to say that boomboxes, club systems, laptop speakers, and hyped up car stereos cannot seriously be included when evaluating audio quality. These systems are what he calls "extreme" as in extremely tilted in favor of certain frequencies. Or to put it in simpler words, they're either inefficient and distorted or too exaggerated in favor of things like bass.

We live in an increasingly lo-fidelity, noisy world. Particularly in city environments, where the amount of constant noise interferes with our ability to perceive audio that we actually want to listen to. In our cars, we are always travelling with a large amount of road, wind, and engine noise. So we do stupid things like turn up the bass and treble on our inefficient, distortion-plagued car stereos to compensate. Forgetting, of course, that the CD's we're listening to are already super loud and super bright and bass-heavy.

Our ears contain delicate sensory hairs and membranes that can only take so much of a beating before they just give up. We go to a club or concert, have some drinks, and start thinking it all sounds pretty good - thanks to the alcohol, we ignore the assault on our eardrums that the sound systems are pushing. Which just doubles the damage. Can you hear a kitten purring 20 feet away from you in a room while two people are talking? When you were 4 years old, you could. But let's face it, you've done some permanent damage to your hearing by now.

What CD's do you consistently listen to? Not the loudest ones. Loud can be perceived as being "better", but only briefly. After that, it's just fatiguing. The CD's you listen to are the ones with your favorite musical content.

Which brings me back to the subject of demos. If a product demo doesn't grab you, it's because the musical content didn't resonate with you. Not the audio quality - it can't be, unless you're listening to a 50,000 dollar audio mastering system in a balanced, quiet, acoustically correct room. Most of us aren't doing that. Most of us are listening to sound systems that exhibit distortion and either lack or exaggerate ranges of the audio spectrum.

Furthermore, what sounds "good" to you depends on your own musical taste. If you enjoy music that depends on exaggerated (and often lo-fidelity) production values, such as hip-hop, rap, and dance, then you just might prefer the sound of anything that is bass and treble heavy, and distorted and loud. In that case, my acoustic nylon guitar demo I recorded using the Motif XS isn't gonna float your boat. And you'll probably say "the XS doesn't sound good". Because you didn't hear what you wanted to hear. If your taste leans to classical and folk music, and I play you a hip-hop track I made with the Motif XS, then again, you're gonna say the XS doesn't sound good.

In either case, it isn't the Motif XS (or any combination of synths I used) that is the determining factor. It's the composition and production values I applied. And as they say, you can't please all the people all the time.

Asking how good something sounds is like asking how long is a piece of string. It's meaningless. Maybe you think your i-pod sounds good. I don't. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be enjoying your i-Pod, or your car stereo, or the sound down at the club. There's a difference between what actually sounds good technically and what one enjoys listening to.

I worked once on an album with an engineer with platinum major label credits and fantastic ears. Whenever I asked him about what he thought about a certain aspect of the track we were working on, he'd either say "I like it" or "I don't like it". That to me is the most honest answer anyone could give.

Instruments don't sound either good or bad. They sound the way they sound. You either like it, or you don't. I think that's the best way to settle it.