grainy sounding high end system

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.

Hi folks, something quite shocking has happened! As you know my preamplifier (the former designer's reference Conrad-Johnson Premier 7b) went to the dealer for tube replacement, so I got the idea to use my NAD C350 integrated amplifier as preamplifier. This $400 NAD unit did a tremendous job: I hear now a totally different and better sound.
My God, how is this possible! The graininess has been almost eliminated and there is much less accent on the treble together with a more prominent midrange and lower midrange. So the sound is gaining coherence, while losing some tubey airiness, but what the heck... Can you imagine, a simple NAD unit vs. a reference grade preamplifier which costs 15 times the NAD. There must be some explanation. Maybe the Conrad-Johnson unit is sounding less than pristine due to aging (tubes, capacitors), or maybe there is some incompatibility with the Mark Levinson 333, I don't know. I'm considering another preamplifier now, a solid state one, like for example the Jeff Rowland Synergy II. If there is anyone from Conrad-Johnson in this forum, please let him/her give a response to this issue. Shocking stuff...

Preamps can make all the difference in the world.
Good preamps are hard to find.

I bet though, after you get your preamp retubed, it will sound better than your NAD.

KF

FWIW, several years ago when I substituted a C-J PV-8 for an 80's-vintage NAD component preamp, the sound improved in all ways. But I would expect there are likely many newer choices today which could handily exceed the Premier 7's fidelity in absolute terms, including the latest C-J's. You might want to click on my threads and read the one about preamp bypass comparision testing for a slightly different perspective on evaluating preamp performance.