grainy sounding high end system

Not knowing your cables, I will assume the cables are not the problem.

I would try to demo a different digital front end and see if that is your problem. Try to demo a nice one box CDP. If your sound is still grainy, the next likely suspect is your preamp. Make sure all of your tubes are good. Maybe even try a backup set of tubes if you have one. See if you can demo a nice preamp. If grain is still persisting with a demo preamp.... Make sure all of your speaker drivers are functioning. You could possibly have a blown or have a defective driver. You might want to check your speaker drivers first.

If none of the above solves your problem, well it is probably your cables. You need to demo different cables to see if that grain goes away.

If it's not your ICs or none of the above... you might want to goto an ear doctor and have your hearing checked.

Good Luck!

KF

I know somebody's gonna' shoot me just for saying this. But I'll bet dollars to doughnuts(whatever that means), more than any other component or combination thereof, it's probably your amp first and foremost.

My list of potential culprits include in descending order:

1. ML amp.
2. Line conditioning and/or Dedicated lines and circuits and/or Cables.

How do, Zaikesman? Thanks for the advice and I passed on that product.

-IMO

Hi folks, thx for your response. I started this thread before I decided to get my preamp tubes replaced. Tube aging might be the culprit of the problem. The system sounds not only grainy and dynamically compressed but there is also a higher than normal noise level.
I think my audio system should sound OK (at least on paper) and without the abovementioned artifacts. But despite all the efforts I've made the last few years I haven't even managed to get a musical sounding "baseline" system. And this is quite frustrating.

Getting a musical sounding baseline is much more difficult with digital and SS gear.

The pioneer transport (I once owned it), is vibration prone, even when you are spinning only the little platter in the middle.

Are you confident in the quality of your DAC? I am not personally familiar with it, however, getting musical with digital for me meant moving up to 16 and ultimately to 24 bit DACs.

Beyond lousy digital playback, I generally associate compression with amplifier limitations. I have heard some pretty sterile sounding, fatiguing and expensive amplifiers in my day.

If you bought your speakers from a dealer, have you considered asking him to let you swap your electronics into his system?

I found the treble and upper midrange on my SC-IIIs somewhat hashy, dry and grainy before installing 3 Audiopoints on each of the plinths. The Audiopoints made the sound much more cohesive from top to bottom, and greatly enhanced focus and clarity.

I don't bi-wire my SC-IIIs, so in an effort to eliminate the need for an external jumper I pulled the rear crossover cover to hook up all the low and high +/- leads to one set of binding posts. I discovered that 1) the nuts that secure the hookup tabs to the binding posts were only hand tightened, and 2) I found in one crossover that a lead from a capacitor had a broken solder joint. After fixing the solder joint, and tightly securing the low and high +/- tabs to one set of binding posts there was a nice improvement in resolution and coherency. The short version is you might want to check the internal connections on your SC-IVs to make sure everthing is tight and there are no loose or broken connections.