It was when in 1972 I first heard a direct-to-disk LP (Sheffield S-10) that I got a sense of the main failing of hi-fi systems: to reproduce the startling, instantaneous "snap" of live instruments, whether a stick striking a drum head, a piano keyboard being pounded by a pair of strong hands, or one of the strings on an upright bass being yanked on, rebounding and bouncing off the neck and creating a "buzz". Finding components that excel at that ability has long been a priority for me in system building (the other being lifelike timbre, the lack of vowel coloration).
Equally important is the "inter-transient silence" (as J. Peter Moncrieff of IAR called it) between notes, which throws the notes themselves into high relief or contrast.
These two criteria very much effect the sense of musical timing and flow, important to the above advanced audiophiles. They are also very instrumental in the creation of transparency, the freedom from added veiling and texture (not the texture of the reproduced instruments, but texture added BY the system). The irony is that good systems today are much more transparent than are the vast majority of recordings we play on them! The sound quality of recordings is now the major bottleneck in the reproduction of music.
