Chashmal, Having spent a full day with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Paris in 1975 at a master class, and having later scored in a very minimilistic and pointillistic style, I know exactly what you are referring to. It is of course worth remembering that the use of 'silence' as a palpable sonic element in music is not terribly new, but goes back to the dawn of human history. I can't comment on Vinyl's ability of texturing the 'false void' with reverberating echos of decaying harmonics as analog has not been my chosen medium since 1984. On the other hand, my system currently rigged with an Esoteric X-01 limited, a Rowland Capri pre, Rowland 312 and a pair of Vienna mahlers does exactly what you are suggesting. . . It makes me profoundly aware of the difference between the untextured lack of sound between tracks and the musical magic of the venue during a pause or a slow decaying sostenuto. I venture to suggest that while it is likely that both good vinyl and some very good digital may yield the exceedingly low level information present in structural 'silences', in reality each component in the chain contributes to the effect. It is perhaps the interplay between the various components that create the magic. I have played the 2nd movement of Dvorak's Symph No. 9 under Bernstein and the Israel Phil for years. . . little I knew that at the very end, just before the solo chords of the mid strings there exists a horrid engineering splice, where the sound engineer cuts short the decay from the previous ascending arpeggio and inserts a little fragment containing a couple of seconds of dead silent hall followed by the aforementioned chords. I heard this clearly only a few weeks ago for the first time. . . had I just gotten a new CD player? Not really, rather, I had inserted the JRDG Capri and the 312 in the chain. I also was able to detect to some extent the same engineering problem using the Nuforse Ref 9 SE V2 instead of the 312, but not when I had the ARC Ref 3 in the chain, nor when I was using my trusty old Rowland 7M monoblocks, nor when my speakers were still the lovely MagnePan IIIAs. . . . all of this, in my admittedly limited experience, seems to be suggesting that analog vs digital may be -- at least in this particular area -- a red herring.
