Phelonious, you always ask the tough ones.
It's in the job description.
Since you say you have heard a lot of euphonic systems, I am guessing are not impoverished in your audio system experiences and thus I am hoping my examples will make sense to you.
I have. I've even owned a few. And in my experience "euphonic" can mean many different things, depending upon the taste of the person who has deemed a system to be "euphonic."
What I mean by analytic, in most simple terms I can state, is that analytic gear puts the sound under the microscope. One can hear the details such as if the guy has hair or no hair on his cojones as he is scratching them with his nails.
Preliminary question (more later): Is the sound of the hair on those cojones or the nails on the scratcher in a frequency range untouched by the music you're attempting to enjoy? Is it at a volume level below the noise floor of your "euphonic" system?
Instead, I am interested when the gear designer, instead of spotlighting the ball scratching, bakes those details into the musical whole.
How do you suppose the designer avoids spotlighting the scratching of the cojones without muting the sound of the brushes on the ride cymbal that covers much of the same range the cojones fall into? Does he have a special EVO-filled cojones-filtering capacitor?
Some brands like Bryston, dCS, and this Magico speaker over-focus on those artifacts and they cater to audiophiles who either have impoverished live musical experiences or are just interested in hearing and discovering those details in the sound instead of losing themselves in the musical.
Again, how do the find those artifacts, separate them from the music in the same bandwidth, and "over-focus" on them? The ability to do that would truly be "Magico!" but I just don't think it works that way. In the studio, particularly in a modern digital studio, you can go in, find a
true artifact, isolate it and boost or cut a very narrow frequency that the worst of it resides in with only minimal impact on the music around it. In the design of an amplifier/preamp/DAC/speaker, even if you could anticipate all the artifacts of "clinicalness" that may occur in all the music that it could possibly play, this is not something the Gandalf could pull off, much less a mortal engineer.
However, brands like Naim, Ayre, Dartzeel, Luxman, etc., have those rich details yet let the listener focus on the music itself instead of the details.
Same statement, different words. Either these components have the goods to resolve these details or they don't. They are not smart systems and they cannot differentiate between what the individual audiophiles sitting in front of them think is analytical vs. musical.
When I go to a show, my mind tunes out the guy whispering to his wife in a near by seat or some guy with a cold. I want my system to present the music (not the sound, not the artifacts!) so I can do the same at home.
You're doing exactly the same thing when you sit down in front of your system. You may be aided by a system that exaggerates or mutes some part of its frequency response, or adds some distortion that smoothes details down for you a bit, or it may be psychological. But your system cannot resolve all the musical details and leave behind any "artifacts" in the same bandwidth, on the fly, with an infinitely variable dynamic that adjust to the music being played.
That, my friend, is simply outside of the scope of the current technology. That, at least now, is impossible.
Tim
