will
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What is CDaPs?
If I recall correctly, isn't the process/medium induced compression of tape and vinyl a "flaw" removed with digital.....but "flaw" or friend?.... aside from high resolution, a product is musically pleasant smoothing. Roughly 50 Db seems pretty good dynamic range for LPs compared to possibly 90 for a CD...and zero stylus-groove sound.... I guess the clean and perhaps brutally complete nature of digital recordings, things tape and vinyl smoothed by nature, this is something we can't seem to definitively solve, though we are close with some sources.
And generally, most of us are seduced by the clean, revealing possibilities of digital, but struggle with colder/harder aspects we haven't completely sorted, calling it “digital,” like digital is a name for the devil.
I just put up the preset compressor on "light" in my player software, and things did smooth out, especially noticeable in those higher areas we might call "digital glare." I did not like it better, because I like refined detail and dynamics, but it did do some smoothing.
For me, I guess it goes back to the need to make whatever sound we have better and quit the comparisons of analog versus digital. Neither are innately perfect representations of real music, but we can work to get either to sound more real to us. The “debate” as to which is better is probably a contributor the difficulties that remain in making digital sound like real music.
We looked some at this earlier, but noise reduction, like digital cleanliness...both are double edged. Some of the "right" noise can be pretty "musical" and "smoothing." Also, when we take noise out, we might reveal sound imbalances we were less aware of. Or, the way we remove noise, that tool's signature, may not be friendly in our system...like the P5 was not friendly for me.
What are our tools to smooth, warm..... Pretty much everything can take it one way or the other...source, tubes, any cable, isolation materials, the particular power treatments we use......
But since you gained smoothness with the LSPU, and lost smoothness since, looking at what changed since the LPSU makes sense. And you did have "ultra smooth detail" with the firewire drive in place and the fan circuit broken, right?
By introducing vibration reduction, your bass was cleaned up, sounding quieter, and presumably the rest of the ranges improved also. Bass and midrange muddle in the right proportions can cause a pleasant warming effect.
It is possible that one or more materials have upset the balance...the steel balls, what they sit in, and perhaps the ply??? Different materials have different sound even when isolation is pretty good, and perhaps in part you are experiencing resonance imbalances. With known quantities, like Herbie's balls, different balls are actually useful tuning tools. It even seems possible that some resonances are being enhanced, at least within the relative balance of reduced vibration noise overall. And what is that between the Torii and the steel balls?
Steve at Herbie's has done loads of research to find ball material, and other foot materials that are neutral while effectively isolating. Not that he has necessarily mastered this in all cases, but it has been a primary objective, indicating the importance.
That you used the term "sharpened things up a lot" to describe the effect of isolation may be telling.
But even if your isolation were relatively balanced, or at least not enhancing this "digital" quality, by virtue of getting rid of vibration born noise, lowering the total noise floor, this would expose more of what you have in your system. So any flaws may become more apparent...like perhaps EMF noise introduced to your gear from the LSPU. And since nothing is in isolation, this cleaner slate may expose a power cord, IC or Speaker cable that was pretty right, but may not be best now, even in the position it is in. Or a tube...even if things are evenly better from noise reduction, weaknesses that were not obvious may come out.
You have also changed to 6922s, tubes that tend to be more rigid. They often make the mids to highs harder, especially in a MKIII.
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