Is revealing always good?

when it reveals shortcomings of a bad recording, you have succeeded. You dont want to pollute your rig so it makes bad recordings sound acceptable. What you can do is try to make them sound better. My "bad' recordings all went away when I got a new killer preamp, upgraded cables and controlled my vibration and ground as well as finally did something with my room. My motown CDs do show the treble boost but that is on the recording. What you can do is get either a lesser cartridge or lesser cd player (cheaper, not too good at revealing all the flaws, for those 'bad' recordings). You still have a revealing system (better cartridge/cd player for the good recordings) and you haven't compromised your rig. For me, I could not rest until the bad recordings sounded awesome. There really are very few very poor recordings. Even what seems like compressed pop cd's from the 70s can sound better off a hard drive, resampled/clocked and then going through a really good system. You really want to be able to play everything-audiophile cd & vinyl as well as stream tidal and all of it make your jaw drop. Dont compromise...and in order to not compromise, you need to reveal.

Another option is to use a speaker switch box and have warm, easy-to-listen-to speakers in the front corners and higher def speakers situated more forward into the room. If the recording is harsh, press the button that changes the speakers. Or do it manually. Or just use warm, easy-to-listen-to speakers.

I got sick of this too and switched to pro stuff, big JBLs which sound good more often than the audiophile speakers I have tried over the years.

If the recording is harsh, you need to know if the performance was harsh. If it was, no problem. If it wasn't, you need to fix it, not cover it up. If she ain't pretty, wearing dark glasses won't make her prettier.

Recordings are works of art that should be reproduced as accurately as possible fbofw.

Those old paintings by Michelangelo are showing their age. Someone should do something about that. 😏

I recently bought a very revealing and transparent CD player (and AVM player). Because I listen to redbook CD's and 705 of the CD's I listen to are jazz recordings from ca. 1955-1963 the recordings often have bad "digititus." The piano's ring, clarinet is harsh, transients are blurred --- just the nature of the recordings. With a revealing CD player, all this was palpably evident so much so that at least 1/2 those CD's were rendered unlistenable. Now, with a cheaper, more colored CD player (a new Creek) --- not nearly as revealing --- one that "rounds off" some of this digititus, these CD's are again listenable.

So... is revealing a particularly good thing for redbook CD playback? I think not. is "colored" always a bad thing? I'd say no. At least for CD playback. Thoughts?
Robsker

What you are hearing in your playback system is high levels of distortion that appears to you as "revealing". People have come up with ingenious names for distortion & "revealing" is just one of them. You have some inexpensive component in your system & you also have high distortion loudspeakers that are making many of your CDs unlistenable.
Once you replace the offending electronics & convert to a time-coherent speaker (which is minimum phase over most of the audio bandwidth. When I say most i mean something like 200Hz - 8 or 10KHz) all your CDs will become listenable once again. The bad recordings from the early era of Jazz will still be bad recordings but they will be listenable & you will enjoy the music from them.
So, no "revealing" is not good because it signifies distortion/high levels of distortion.