Is Upgrading Degrading?

Jult52 it was for Dostoevsky here on Audiogon it is more like All happy audiophiles are like all other happy audiophiles, all unhappy audiophiles are unhappy due to their system, room, individual pieces of equipment and anything else that might be part of the audio experience and each to their own varying degree of unhappiness.

I AGREES WITH MARBURG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well any change I've made to my system, and kept, was because I thought the change gave me more music. Often that has meant more detail, because it seems more basic equipment loses information or hides it.

What seems to me a possibly related question turns on the issue of "naturalness" as the most sought-after attribute in a fine stereo system.

To what degree do audiogioners agree (or disagree) that approximating a live performance ought to be the highest goal? If a violin sound is pleasing to us but significantly enhanced through technology to the point where it is no longer a close equivalent to a real instrument, is this an abomination or a natural extension of our abilities to play with sound to an almost endless degree? After all, many recordings are heavily edited to remove performance mistakes and artificially create a performance that may not be duplicable in "real life."

Marburg, editing a recording to remove a mistake doesn't seem to me to be the same thing, or done for the same purpose, as an enhancement "through technology to the the point where it is no longer a close equivalent to a real instrument".

For example, Glenn Gould spliced tape to get the most perfect expression (in his view) of the music as it was written. I believe him to have been a bit compulsive about this but I'm not arguing with the results.

The goal of high end playback technology is similar in nature although the expression is not the same in kind. What playback wants to do is alter the original recorded signal as little as possible.

That has to be done with a grain of salt when we are remastering Alan Lomax's recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, for example, since the recording technology produced a signal with speed variations.

I guess this is where your point seems relevant to me. We can all agree that a musical sound is more natural when the recording and playback systems don't change the data or introduce artifacts. Some of us can hear the imposed data better than others, but all of us can hear some things.