Musicality vs Transparency & Detail

Interesting questions you pose, Montepilot. For me, I've always enjoyed detail and resolution, but too often that has come at the expense of musical naturalness. It seems relatively easy to design for more apparent detail but harder to maintain overall correct rendering of harmonic overtones -- the key in my experience to musically natural sound reproduction. I'd far rather trade-off some amount of detail and some level of transparency for greater accuracy of timbre and harmonic overtones. In the 80s, this was for me always the classic trade-off between Audio Research and conrad-johnson gear: c-j always made music for me, even without the ultimate in detail and resolution.

Today, many designers are achieving a much better synthesis of musical naturalness and resolution. Among the equipment I'm fond of, Jim White's work with his Jupiter series Callisto and Io preamp and phono stage comes immediately to mind, as does Ralph Karsten's work with his Atma-Sphere MA-1 and MA-2 OTL amps. I don't think you can go too far in the search for transparency and detail retrieval, but I do think it's easy to go astray and lose the music.

One final thought: don't confuse Salvatore's priority on "low level retrieval" with "high detail." Salvatore is very careful to clarify that he's looking for is the ability to retrieve the very quietest musically relevant information and not have that low volume information masked by system noise. In his March 2007 blog update, he clarifies this a bit with a discussion of "noise floor" and "sound floor".
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Bear in mind that bad recordings will sound bad, but you won't be adding insult to injury.

I'm reminded of the story about a well known reviewer who vastly preferred a given set of cables because they made one well-treasured recording sound wonderful. Unfortunately, that well-treasured recording was really a sonic disaster with sharp, edgy sonics. The cables smoothed over all the edginess, added a mid-bass boost, rolled off the top end, and made that one record very listenable. For this reviewer, there was no question but that this cable was far superior to another cable on hand that had made some outstandingly well-recorded orchestral LPs sound wonderful in the reviewer's same system just hours earlier, but allowed the "well-treasured" LP to sound like it's true self.
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