Thank you. I should clarify something in my comments, which could be misunderstood by some.
Some people who are less analog-friendly might misconstrue my comments about the dCS Rossini sounding more like great analog as meaning that it successfully has adopted the colorations of analog. If they thought that this is what my comments meant they would be seriously mistaken.
While I agree that lesser analog can sound rather colored, I don't perceive great analog that way. I perceive it as more approaching the sound of live music than most digital -- people who know me well will understand this. So when I say, the dCS Rossini sounds like great analog, I really mean that it sounds more like live music because its sound is free of all the artifacts that have plagued digital so far, and the accuracy and resolution of timbre is much better -- nothing else. And Peter, with whom I have shared several experiences of live music, feels the same way.
Thank you for this clarification, Al.
It has been a fascinating week. Al has been on vacation and has listened to a lot of music. This began with our trip to Goodwin's to audition the Berkeley Ref and dCS Rossini DACs. He then listened to his system with the Goodwin's experience in mind, while I cleaned some new/old records. I later visited him and heard his Berkeley Alpha DAC. The difference in resolution and naturalness between his system and what we heard at Goodwin's was striking, although Al's system continues to be a standard bearer for Presence, dimensionality, palpability and believable imaging. Truly remarkable. This is partly due to his good equipment but, I think, much more to the room and set up which he has worked very hard to achieve. Yesterday, Al, another friend, and I listened to my system and then Al and I had some tea and discussed all things audio and what this past week of listening has taught us.
Having listened to live music a number of times with Al, it is clear that his reference, like mine, is live, acoustic music, both small scale chamber and also larger orchestral music at the BSO, Vienna and elsewhere. As we have written before, each of us owns either digital or analog, but not both. So we know those sources with all of their characteristics well, and we compare them to our live references. I strongly believe that there is no absolute sound, per se, but a range of sound that we hear when listening to different musicians playing their different instruments in different halls. For Al and I to consider an audio system's reproduction to sound convincing or believable, it must remind us of the sound of an instrument that we have heard live. It will not sound exactly the same, but if successful, the system will reproduce the sound closely enough so that it falls somewhere within the range of our experience of how we have heard it sound somewhere in the past.
We have all read reviews of digital products that sound "analog like". The reviewer usually means this as a compliment, but it can be interpreted by some to mean that it has the same colorations and distortions of analog. That it has a similar "warmth" and the pleasing sound as analog. That it is subjectively preferred to digital, but that it is not accurate. I brought this up with Al yesterday and it got me thinking about how we, as a community of music lovers and audiophiles, misinterpret each other's comments and how we form entrenched camps to emphasize differences and to clarify positions.
The people who give more weight to measurements and to accurately reproducing the original recording generally support their position by pointing out that the recording, flawed as it is, is really all we have to work with in this hobby. The recording is made by an artist, we buy it, and we are left trying to extract and reproduce all of the information as transparently as possible. Fidelity to the recording is the measure of how successful the system is. I understand this view and agree with it to some extent, but it is rooted in objective analysis. I have not compared the measurements between the Berkeley Ref Dac and the Rossini. I'm sure they each measure very well. And they would probably make close to indistinguishable vinyl rips for an analog source. But they sound very different from each other when playing the same recording IF, WE USE OUR MEMORY OF LIVE UNAMPLIFIED MUSIC AS OUR REFERENCE.
Al and I are guided by our experiences of listening to live music. We acknowledge the importance of the recording, but we think that it is not all that we have to work with. We have something else, perhaps equally as important as the recording itself, and that is our MEMORY of what live, music actually sounds like. This is our guide and it influences our decisions and how we make progress in the hobby.
So when one argues that a solid state/digital/active speaker system provides the most accurate copy of the original recording, I think that is fine. Perhaps it does, and I am open to being convinced that that is the case. But, that is not enough. As someone who has listened to a lot of live music, I must also ask "how real does it sound?" Faithfulness to the recording, is not enough for me. I do not see this as an objective/subjective debate. I critique what I hear against my memory of what live music sounds like. A great analog source or a great digital source like the dCS Rossini allows us to more easily believe what we are hearing is an actual performance of music in our listening rooms. It does not matter if the system is digital or analog, solid state or tube, horns, cones or panels.
When Al and I audition a component, we are not asking ourselves if the DAC sounds like analog to us, we are asking ourselves if it sounds like real music to us. If the goal is to get some semblance of what we hear live into our listening rooms, then, what matters is knowing what live music sounds like, and then spending one's time to find the right gear and setting it up properly. If this past week of listening has taught me anything, it is that arguments about dogma are a distraction. I have now heard digital sound convincing, and that has caused me to pause, to reflect, and to celebrate the possibilities.
