Gone are the audiophile adjectives, along with all barriers to musical reproduction. What remains is beautiful, clean, rich, majestic, energetic, palpable, live, natural music.
Just caught that video on WBF of your system running, very impressive! As was indicated in that thread, it is remarkable that a simple recorder mechanism and YouTube can still convey a quite accurate portrait of a system's tonality and overall capabilities. I had no trouble picking up the signature of your setup doing superbly in the space, and since you mentioned it, checked out a couple of other clips of Avalons being driven otherwise. As you say, typical HiFi sound, way short of what can be achieved, and easily discerned even over the YouTube route ...
Rob, I would just say from my point of view that using silver versus gold is not the problem; rather the issue is that the Troy is eliminating a major weakness in your system as demonstrated by the fact that there is far more audible distortion ("harsh and edgy"), when it is removed. Once your ear/brain has to deal with more distortion, every tiny, tiny thing you do to the system will easily picked up by your ears as a change, meaning that there is a change in the nature of the distortion. If you shift a cable 2" to the right, if you put a piece of aluminium foil on top of the amp, absolutely everything will make a difference, including whether you use silver, gold, platinum, copper, bronze, or iron, etc, etc.
Sorry, Rob, I didn't quite get the point across which I was trying to make: that is, the weaknesses in a system are what causes a recording to sound harsh. It IS possible to eradicate all critical weaknesses and it is certainly worthwhile doing so, because then you will be in the enviable position of there being no such thing as a harsh recording. Having read the recent posts of muralman1 I would suggest that he has reached this goal, especially since he comments on listening right next to his speakers ribbons.
I agree that "large" performances are more difficult to get right, because all the ambience clues have to be reproduced with a sufficient degree of correctness. Studio recordings frequently surround the performances with enormous soundstages, a good example being Led Zeppelin's first recording, and the system has to work extremely well to reproduce this convincingly.
Okay, Rob -- may I call you that, I notice on earlier posts you signed off with such -- may I be so bold as to suggest that there may still be weaknesses with your setup. My experience is that when the system IS working to a sufficiently high level then the ear/brain can be completely "fooled", that is, sufficient information is being presented correctly to the auditory system to fully counter the impact of distortion components generated by the reproducing system, and the auditory system says, "this IS real".
The positive side effect of this is the drivers truly disappear, and I mean, to the degree suggested by my earlier post. That is, you CAN approach the tweeter on one side while the system is working at normal volume and not be able to identify the sound emerging from the driver, even if your ear is literally only inches away! To many people this will sound quite bizarre, and impossible, but once experienced the sensation can never be forgotten.
Why this can happen is that the ear/brain has its own compression system built in; people experience this when the volume is steadily wound up on a good system, and they don't realise how loud it is. Their ear/brains have automatically compensated for the increase by internally compressing the sound level. Another way of experiencing this is that when the system is working well is to stand close to the speakers and then walk further and further away, down the hallway, say: the sound level will not appear to drop significantly even when you are many 10's of feet away.
So the action of putting your ear next the driver is the same process, but in reverse. Any harshness there is picked up the ear/brain and the "real" illusion is shattered -- you can hear the driver working.
My own method is to use recordings with the "worst", "harshest" string tone, or high level ringing cymbals, and the ear against the driver test, to assess progress ...
Rtn1, sorry I didn't respond earlier... Actually, I do understand exactly what you are trying to convey when you say "opening the soundstage, creating a sense of true depth, and letting everything flow. It is very hard to describe, until you hear it." In my experience, this is precisely what one's goal should be, but as you indicate, very difficult to reach, and once achieved extremely precarious in nature. It is pretty clear that very, very few people have persevered to the point of achieving that level of reproduction ...
When you say up to 95% of your classical recordings are excellent, how would you characterise the failings of that last 5%. I notice you posted on a thread about the "sweetness" of violins: would you say the string tone on the 5% is harsh, or dull or indistinct, or is it something quite other that is the problem.
You mention your speakers disappearing: how close can you approach the tweeter of one channel when playing at normal volume before your ear can identify that sound is coming from the driver?
Rtn1, your system sounds very much like it's virtually succeeded in reaching the goal I believe in, which is to eliminate ALL weaknesses.
One of the criteria I use is that "bad" recordings no longer sound "bad". How far do you feel you have gone in that direction; in other words, are there still any recordings you have that can't be enjoyed for their musical content, because the level and type of distortion audible is still too great?
