Don Hills
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Given your preferred technology you appear to be referring to pre-echo, which of course is real and audible.You certainly can hear pre-ringing. Look for tracks that start with a very loud transient and there will be slight noise just a poofteenth of a second before the music starts. But within the music, I struggle to hear it / or I can't hear it at all. But knowing that it is there somehow bothers me
I can understand your being bothered by things that you know are there but can't hear. Years ago when someone would argue that records sounded better than CDs I would play a 1 KHz tone from a test record. Ignoring the occasional crackle and pop, I would point out the subtle loudness variations and slight "breathiness" etc, even when the turntable setup was high end. I would then play the same track off a test CD, and the improvement in steadiness and purity was not subtle. The defects in the record playback were of course masked by the transient nature of actual music, except maybe for solo piano music, but I pointed out that the defects were still there even if inaudible. This somehow bothered some people.