Musicality

I suppose it depends on what you mean by good or better. As I said earlier, my most consistant (but most annoying as I have difficulty resolving it into qunatifiable terms) is "Can I follow the tune".

As I agree with your assessment of FM sound, might the lossy processing from the CD source to your radio simply removes information (or crud)that is not pertinant to the musical message and thus allow the brain to concentrate on what is actually important?

Michael Fremer has a parallel experience with a CD copies of LP tracks played on a Rockport being prefered to the same LPs on a Simon Yorke turntable. He normally professes to prefering LP to CD when played on the Simon Yorke. Michael uses similar criteria to me for 'better'. This raises some analogous points to FM. Is the LP mastering/playback/CD-R process more transparent than CD mastering CD playback - I don't think so. So why does he prefer LPs on the Simon Yorke to the CD? Perhaps crud filtering is at work here too.

Perhaps the advantage of SACD/DVD-A over CD will be the replacement of crud with real information.

Maybe Naim amplfiers are crud filters (blue touch paper lit, stands back waiting for heavy duty replies).

Conventional measurements of CD players only partially back up this hypothesis. It would be interesting to see whether ther was a preference for a 'straight' CDS2 or for CDS2 through a transmission chain and NAT01. This may isolate the source of the problem/improvement.

I think we still need to define what seperates "music" from "sound" though. I haven't seen much of a hypothesis on this. Anybody got ideas that can be quantified?

Over to you.

"I suppose it depends on what you mean by good or better."

By good or better I mean "more enjoyable" - not necessarily hogher quality/Fi but just more involving, more musical in the sense discussed in the PRat thread.

regards,

Mark

Mark,

My Naim system is playing since I'm at home until I go to sleep.

While driving my car - I used to listen to news broadcasting - Israel is full with news - now I listen to music while driving but it came to me because of a woman and not because of Naim (with all respact to Naim...) so check yourself for the
reason of listening to more music everywere...
(BTW - this woman dumped me several month ago but I'm still with the "habit" to listen to music everywhere).

I've noticed too that FM broadcasting gives pleasure everywhere no matter what is the source
(with some limits of course...) and I think it is because of the importance of the source.
I've spoken once with a technician in a local broadcasting here in Haifa and I found that they are using very expensive sources especially made for brodcasting - cd players made by Teac
and expensive turntables made by another Japanese
well known manufacture - I don't remeber the name
i think it was Sansui - and BTW, he explained to me that they must use a direct drive TT 'cause it is important that the TT goes to the right speed as quickly as possible).

I'm sure that if this local broadcatinsg is using expensive source components, no doubt in my heart
that the national broadcasting are using very very very.... expensive sources and we enjoy it as we recieve it even with not an expensive tuners. The BBC for example, are known with paying attention to quality of sound and I guess
they and other broadcasting are using expensive sources - and that is the reason to the hi quality of sound we enjoy so much with FM receiving.

Arie