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"unnaturally crisp quality of digital sound" can be eliminated

Digital recordings and CDs "suffer from" an unusually flat high frequency response that often does not sound like the high frequency roll off that we were used to from stereo cartridges, records, microphones, and speaker tweeters "in the old days".

Part of the subjective high frequency "roll-off" was caused by the masking effect of harmonic distortion inherent with records (up to 100 times higher than CDs), and surface noise.

The result is some high frequency roll-off on vinyl which sounds natural to most listeners. I don't recall any people claiming records would sound better if only they had more high frequency output, although many complained about the surface noise.

CDs can easily provide a "conductor's perspective" of a performance, especially with close-miked recordings, which is brighter (more detailed) than we would hear at our seats in the middle of an auditorium during a live acoustic performance (air is a good high frequency sound absorber).

This effect is easily reduced with a slight twist of a treble control ... which is hard to do if you are an audiophile who shuns tone controls of any kind and has never even experimented with this "tweak".

There is often less bass roll-off under 50Hz. on CDs, when compared with most records, but many people enjoy this.

The redbook sampling frequency is MUCH too fast for our ears to hear "gaps" and room reflections (reverberation) could easily fill in much larger "gaps".

A real test would require listeners to compare a person playing an instrument live to a digital recording/CD of the same person & song and an analog recording/vinyl record of the same person & song. Without objective tests, people often claim to hear whatever they were expecting to hear before the audition.

The sound we hear has been transformed from acoustic energy in a hall or recording studio into electrical energy, and then from DC to AC more than once, and then from electrical energy back to acoustic energy in a different room. It's amazing what we hear sometimes sounds like live music being performed in our listening rooms.
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo

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