Sean-just to carify, I briefly auditioned the Complete and NAD but lived with the Parasound for quite awhile. It was the Parasound that I referred to as pleasant more from what it omitted than anything it conveyed. When you listen to "California", cut six on Joni Mitchell's Blue, you should hear the sympathetic vibration of the unplucked overtone strings on Joni's 12 string, the Parasound only hinted at it. The Cambridge gives you the full measure. Likewise in the "Trinity Sessions" there are all sorts of things going on in the hall besides Margo and her brothers. Before the Cambridge, it never even occured to me to check the liner notes to discover the performance was live. No coughing, though.
These are asides, I don't listen for oddities but they are a part of the listening experience, the ambience. Perhaps a particular microphone is more attuned to picking up this or that frequency off axis. I've heard it often enough, sitting in the back row of the orchestra, to know why a really professional producer checks to be sure that the snares on an unused snare drum are loose so they don't sizzle every time the Tuba joins the band. (Of course, I've NEVER brought along a paperclip to put on the drum) The central issue of owning high resolution equipment though, at least to me, is re-creating the sense of the hall. If a soprano is overloading the acoustics of that hall, I want to hear the distortion, all of it. When Heifetz is tearing away at a cadenza full of double stops with wild downbows I want to hear every harmonic and when Hendrix is setting Marshalls on fire I want to smell the smoke and feel the panic of the roadies.
