Trade offs?

there is no accounting for taste. i believe our hobby is primarily about enjoyment and not about audio "correctness".

thus, there are many ways to achieve satisfaction when listening to music. there is also no free lunch.

if one chooses to minimize coloration, the quality of recordings will become apparent. the greater the focus the more obvious the warts.

the level of focus is the key. some want more, some less.

you can't eat your cake and have it too.

if one alleges greater resolution associated with less harshness, i doubt that there is either greater resolution or greater ease of listening.

you can't have both. it is foolish to propose unattainable listening goals.

there is a trade off that implicitly or explicitly occurs as one tries to hear all there is to hear on a recording.

i am wrestling with this myself, with my recent purchase of quad 57s. let's distinguish between what is attainable and what is impossible to achieve.

it's unfortunate that designers of preamps do not offer a focus control. such a capability, i believe would solve a lot of problems. it is possible that the issue of tubes vs solid state would no longer be an issue.

most recordings are replete with timbral reproduction errors. it therefore comes as no surprise that a high-resolution system will reveal such errors to an experienced listener.

I think you're analogy should be putting $500 tires (and new rims if necessary) on a BMW; just buy higher profile (higher aspect ratio) tires and made of softer tread. It won't corner as well in Alps but 90% of your driving will be much smoother and dare I say enjoyable.

Just sticking to cd playback. Your can get both high resolution and musicality, I've heard it with GNSC modded top-of-line Esoteric and Wadia players (my highly modded digital setup is pretty close). High resolution is relatively easy with digital, add refinement and your talking big bucks.

I can also understand where Tvad is coming from with the less resolution comment. I've had a couple tube DACs, more refinement with slightly less resolution, give up a bit here to get a bit more there.

Recording quality certainly needs to be accounted for as well, some recordings will always sound like crap.

"If the majority of your recordings sound harsh, then it's your system or source component, not your recordings."

I'd have to agree.

Mr Tennis,

Let me be clear about this. Yes, you can have a high-res system that sounds "musical," and you can even more easily have a "high-res" system that makes a lot of recordings sound poor.

But the two are not mutually exclusive... you just really need to know what to do in order to set up a system to be both extremely musical and extremely revealing. It is my experience that a lot of so-called "high-res" systems that are so revealing that they make most recordings sound bad are actually systems with "high-res capable" components that are put together in such a way that they lack the synergy needed to sound musical. It's a big complicated equation... how may of the variables have you addressed and how many have escaped your scrutiny?

My system is exposing more detail than it ever has, and it sounds very musical at the same time. So, as I said, musicality with high resolution is an attainable goal. Some audiophiles have apparently attained it and some have not.

That said, the redbook CD format has a definite resolution ceiling and floor, but it can sound quite detailed and musical within its envelope. One need only look at the many comments from 'philes who know CD as a first language and were disappointed when trying to get equivalent or better performance out of a turntable-based system.

Wide dynamic swings, low-noise, and low-bass extension are the CD format's good points, while great analog excells at midbass through high-frequency definition. It seems that the highs can be smoother and more extended with vinyl, and that is the basis for a lot of what we audiophiles perceive as "fine detail and/or immediacy."

I've been told that the Chesky downloadable HD tracks are very promising, but have not been successful at setting up that system as yet. Hopefully I'll be able to check it out in the future. To date, I've had no luck getting Chesky to answer my e-mails about system requirements or set-up issues. They seem to do a lot of promoting, but are not at all good about answering e-mail regarding trouble-shooting their software.