When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Detlof! Absolutely Poetic!!

Are you sure English is your second language? Are you a poet?

I KNOW it sure is not German to English Translation software. How I know? Just read Porsche's user's manuals ;-).

Detlof, I'm taking up latin as a primary language. Then no one will realize how illiterate I really am! Your use of English remains exceeded only by....well, what is your first language anyway? :-)

Now, that aside, lets have some fun. Lets talk about what specifically we find distracting about the sound we get from our speakers. The sound that is so distracting that you wouldn't no longer hear the 'soul', when such soulfulness is actually in the pits and grooves, with our advanced audio systems and trained ears.

I'll start. Could it be - 1)Pitch, 2)Timbre, and 3)Noise - oh, lest I forget, 4) distortion? Pitch, for example, is a killer for me.

Perhaps, just perhaps mind you, soul is truly found only when we dumb down our audiophile expectations and listen to the performance.

Fun thread...............

Oh definitely, Newbee, pitch control problems throw any performance out the window. . . vocalists, string players some woodwinds can occasionally make me feel sea-sick. I would follow that by metric/rythmic problems. In reproduction I personally abhor treble overpressure, followed by bloat in other spectral regions. Subtractive problems may easily sap the 'life' (MRT plese note single-quote marks--I mean this metaphorically) out of a recording, but do not arouse in me the same 'fight or flight' reflex. And like I suggested elsewhere, bad engineering cuts and edits drive me positively batty.

If you guys promise not to send the boys with the white coats to my door, I'll tell you what I think was responsible for my getting so high on Alex's system(my current theory). At the time, Alex had built a speaker that had a ribbon tweater that was crossed over at 23khz(I believe.). His system made my very good interconnects sound disjointed(I still use them.). Specificity and instruments sounding like themselves weren't outstanding. I think getting high had to do with the extended bandwith. It almost didn't matter what went on below this. Don't laugh, I'm currently undergoing treatment with a Rife Machine-which uses certain frequencies to kill bacteria and viruses.

Mak, Rife machines are thought to eliminate the common cold in 7 to 10 days, very much like Radionics machines, Brilliant Pebbles, and Clever Little Clocks, and sugar pills. . . for more serious infections I suggest you consult an AMA certified physician instead.