Ken Newton
Active Member
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2016
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...The oft repeated story you mention does not agree with my experience.
I've no issue with your reported experience. Ancecdotal experiences certainly vary, partly, as a good number of system variables are involved. My experience, unfortunately for me, was quite the opposite of yours. Which prompts me to elaborate on that experience just a bit.
Warning: what follows necessarily uses subjective language. With CD, the subjective performance aspect I immediately noticed was the lack of vinyl's groove noise. Most tracks were eerily quiet with CD. The next aspect I noticed was an very 'up front' sort of character to the presentation. At first, I attributed this to low distortion amd high dynamic range, and, perhaps, it was. But later I noticed that the up front character remained homogeneously consistent across many recordings. Now, CD's specs. would dictate that this was the more accurate presentation. Perhaps so, but homogeneity often signals some sort of perceptual coloration.
The unforgivable sin of early CD, to my ears, was that despite it's low noise, or high dynamic range, or low distortion, or flat and wide frequency response, the music reproduction was too often boring, and worse, fatiguing upon longer listening. This simply never occured with my objectively much inferior perfoming vinyl set1up. Today, audio engineers have determined many/most of the objective reasons for that. Those just weren't being effectively identified via the traditional, analog audio based, specifications initially.