Detlof, I now understand what you meant. . . in spades. . . but only a few months ago I was slightly less aware of the pervasiveness of the issue of black-inter-track background vs in-track musical silence. Since I have replaced my trusty Maggies IIIAs with the Vienna Mahlers, I have become increasingly upset by the cavalier attitude of those recording engineers who cut off a recorded track before all harmonics have decayed, all ambient echos have subsided, and the recording venue has returned to a state of baseline quiescence. Similarly, I get even more annoyed when a track starts at the very millisecond of the attack transient, or even worse, a couple of milliseconds into the attack without letting me hear the 'new' acoustic--which on a revealing system is positively gross sounding: The transition from black opacity of absolute lack of sound to acoustics 'in medias res' and viceversa is disconcerting, and most unmusical. With my current system, on a reasonable track which has not been recorded by implanting a microphone surgically into the uvula of the vocalist, those very faint ambient cues a--musical and not musical--are present and obvious. The true 'black' background exists only between tracks, and is. . . shapeless. A good acoustic track, recorded live or in a studio, brings to me the sound of the silence of the venue. Related to this is the problem of sudden engineering splices in the recording created out of acoustic context: the new fragment may have been inserted correctly into the final recording, but its low level ambient signature may sound disconcertingly different from what was heard in the previous millisecond. My source is the TEAC X-01 Limited CDp.
When is digital going to get the soul of music?
I have to ask this(actually, I thought I mentioned this in another thread.). It's been at least 25 years of digital. The equivalent in vinyl is 1975. I am currently listening to a pre-1975 album. It conveys the soul of music. Although digital may be more detailed, and even gives more detail than analog does(in a way), when will it convey the soul of music. This has escaped digital, as far as I can tell.
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- 835 posts total
- 835 posts total