Hi frogman, I share with you the admiration for Paul Desmond. I play the alto myself and he has +/- my ideal sound on the instrument (within the limits of my abilities, and the recorded sound as you point out).
Loading MCs: Your line of thoughts reminds me of my experiments with the Magnepan MG3 speakers with their superbly transparent, but often a bit glassy sounding tweeter. I started with the usual recommendation to put a "normal" resistor in series, but this was loosing much too much transparency (a noiseless back-ground with kind of a plentyful sea of lively information). Then I used parallelled ERO Resista metal film resistors, but the effect was not much better. Then I replaced the HF-Litz feeding the ribbon with a thin solid core wire and had success with more transparency and less "noise" and brightness. Ultimately I developped an independent, three-wired new crossover (with soldering to the ribbons... :-) which somehow integrated the superior mid/high transparency of the two-way MG 2.5 (and MG 2.6) into the three-way-MG 3.
Before these changes I had the feeling that my Koetsu Black / VdH 1 needle (Gyger upgrade) was sounding "bright".
Removing the transparency obstacles, which created stress and brightness, allowed to retrieve the VdH1 stylus information without glassyness.
I am skeptical of loading as a cure for problems created elsewhere, it's not really working in that context, it's too much of a compensation game (for me). I loose too much, gain not much.
Besides: The direction of the resistor is as audible as that of cables, as is the brand and type of resistor (and the preparation of the wires and the soldering including the solder).
To attain an experimentally "clean lab table" for these kinds of comparisons, within the context of the ultimately almost always slightly sloppy way people generally do their comparisons, seems pretty optimistic to me.
Loading MCs: Your line of thoughts reminds me of my experiments with the Magnepan MG3 speakers with their superbly transparent, but often a bit glassy sounding tweeter. I started with the usual recommendation to put a "normal" resistor in series, but this was loosing much too much transparency (a noiseless back-ground with kind of a plentyful sea of lively information). Then I used parallelled ERO Resista metal film resistors, but the effect was not much better. Then I replaced the HF-Litz feeding the ribbon with a thin solid core wire and had success with more transparency and less "noise" and brightness. Ultimately I developped an independent, three-wired new crossover (with soldering to the ribbons... :-) which somehow integrated the superior mid/high transparency of the two-way MG 2.5 (and MG 2.6) into the three-way-MG 3.
Before these changes I had the feeling that my Koetsu Black / VdH 1 needle (Gyger upgrade) was sounding "bright".
Removing the transparency obstacles, which created stress and brightness, allowed to retrieve the VdH1 stylus information without glassyness.
I am skeptical of loading as a cure for problems created elsewhere, it's not really working in that context, it's too much of a compensation game (for me). I loose too much, gain not much.
Besides: The direction of the resistor is as audible as that of cables, as is the brand and type of resistor (and the preparation of the wires and the soldering including the solder).
To attain an experimentally "clean lab table" for these kinds of comparisons, within the context of the ultimately almost always slightly sloppy way people generally do their comparisons, seems pretty optimistic to me.