I have this friend, a smart, good-looking young physicist from Argentina. Naturally, I call him "Gaucho." He lives in a glistening-white steel-and-glass apartment overlooking lower Manhattan. I visit him regularly, usually with a group of audio friends, mainly to compare recordings, drink wine, and talk hi-fi.
One day, unexpectedly, Gaucho invited me over to listen to his system-just me-so that I could tell him what I "really think" of his system's sound.
His digital source is Roon into a dCS Rossini DAC and Master Clock. His record player is the latest SME 20/3 turntable with an SME V arm and a Dynavector XV-1s moving coil cartridge, which feeds a van den Hul Grail SE trans-impedance phono stage. These fine sources feed a 25W Kondo (Audio Note Japan) Ongaku integrated amplifier, which drives a pair of Avantgarde Generation 2 Duo Mezzo horn loudspeakers.
The day I visited Gaucho, it was snowing, and the big flakes swirling past his floor-to-ceiling windows put me in a pleasant, dreamy mood. While I sat on the white couch sipping black tea, he played three digital recordings followed by three LPs. I was listening mindfully but not critically, hoping to get a feel for the character of sound energy coming from the horns.
After the third black disc, he stopped and asked me quietly what I was thinking about the sound. I told him that the main thing I noticed was how all the recordings sounded equally nice, but that both digital and analog sounded strangely the same: ethereal, slightly generalized, and lower in density and contrast than I imagined they should. Had he ever noticed anything like that? He said, "No, but it sometimes feels like there are holes in the music. Not centerfill or soundstage extension-it's just this feeling that some notes have somehow disappeared."
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