Two Type of sound and listener preference are there more?

I recently decided I wanted a new preamp.  I have a Bryston bp25 that I've had for 10+ years and a benchmark dac2 that I'm using directly into amps in another system.  After reading a ton the last few months I've re-concluded a decade later that the Bryston philosophy is pretty much the same as mine.  I think I'll probably end up getting a bp26 to put in the system that currently doesn't have a separate preamp.  I guess that puts me in camp 1.

I read a million reviews, comments, etc. and while I believe that other preamps are better in some ways, I decided that things like "greater soundstage depth" are most likely the result of colorations that will have negative aspects as well as positive.  I don't have the patience for trying to balance a variety of distortions/colorations to perfectly match my taste.  Just give me what's on the recording.  

@audiotroy

In our viewpoint if for example you go to a Wedding with a Live band full of brass instruments like horns, trumpts etc it hurts your ears, shouldn’t you want your system to sound like a mirror of what is really there? Isn’t the idea to bring you back to the recording itself?

So the sound you’re going for is a wedding band playing live in a horrible acoustic environment?

This is the second time you mentioned this pretty sad analogy (almost as bad as your bad tires on a Ferrari being anything like using stock power cable instead of a high end power cable analogy). If your Personas sound AT ALL fatiguing/harsh/bright, maybe you’re not the audio "doctor" you claim to be.

You CAN have incredible holography and resolution without losing musicality. The fact that you think it’s one or the other is sad. I had confidence in your ears and knowledge somewhat up to this point (aside from your silly cable beliefs, which are completely and utterly ignorant to even the most basic understanding of human brain biases -- which I mentioned before and you completely ignored), but when you use a WEDDING BAND as a way to describe and as an excuse for a system sounding harsh/bright/fatiguing/etc -- you’ve lost me.  Those horns/cymbals/whatever will not sound the same in a proper venue/environment.  And that's how the speakers should sound.  Not like a trumpet in a bathroom. 

You use an example of the "musical" setup in the other thread as being "NOT fatiguing." NO good set up should be fatiguing at any point (as long as you’re at a reasonable volume). You’re doing it wrong, "doctor." :)

Contuzzi,  your basic understanding of the audio arts is justified by your comments about cabling, power conditioners and believing that people who buy these products after experiencing these products are hypnotizing themselves into believing that these differences exist when obviously they don't. Of course these products work companies like Cardas, Wireworld, Nordost, and many others wouldn't be able to grow to the size they are if these products were not effective and din't produce real results. 

You also missed the post as written, we strive for our systems to have musicality and imaging as well as for a life like tonal quality. The reason for talking about imaging is for some people imaging isn't as important as tonality of course you can have both but certain types or designs may have excellent tonallity but may not image particularly well.

A good horn speaker will have incredible dynamics, most of them have a very pronounced honk in the midrange because of the horn loading, for some people that is not an issue for others it is.

The Wedding band analogy was to prove a point about how real instruments may sound, do you think we are investing thousands and thousands of dollars in matching equipment to make the Personas especially the 9H's sound great if it wasn't necessary?

We tune for reality, and tune the top end so the details and clarity are there without taking your head off. Cabling, power conditioning, roon tuning devices are just some of the tools that we use to make the systems sound the way we want it to sound like.  

The point made was that in reality brass instruments like horns and trumpets can sound aggressive, if you tune your system with warm speakers, warm electronics, etc you may have a system which is very pleasent to listen to but fails to capture any of the realism that live music has.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

Dave, It gets worse.  According to John Siau, technical director of Benchmark Media, overly warm sounding gear can make instruments with complex harmonic structure, like piano, to sound like out of tune.

Many people find natural sounding amps fatiguing, driving speaker with harsh metal dome tweeter.  They seek warm/dull sounding amp to fix it.

Believe it or not, somebody asked on this forum how to make sound warmer with less detail.  I recommended thick blanket over speakers.

Another person stated that the sound of the Benchmark DAC is too detailed - meaning each instruments can be identified.  He preferred all instrument together like sound blob.  We like what we got used to.  

Believe it or not, somebody asked on this forum how to make sound warmer with less detail. I recommended thick blanket over speakers.

If I hear a speaker that is putting out so much detail that I'm hearing things that I've never noticed before and that shouldn't be audible in the mix, it tells me that the speaker is doing something wrong...it's typically due to a boost in the area that I'm hearing too much of and a dip in other frequencies. 

Another person stated that the sound of the Benchmark DAC is too detailed - meaning each instruments can be identified. He preferred all instrument together like sound blob. We like what we got used to.

If you strip away the natural harmonics of music, you get a lean and very detailed sound. Some like it, some don't. To each their own.