I have some very nice recordings of Doug MacLeod , Terry Evans, and Sam McClain. They are all on the Audioquest label and recorded with all Audioquest wire in the recording chain. They all have a very discernible Audioquest signature. I have a whole slew of records recorded all over the place that were all mastered at The Mastering Lab by Doug Sax. Because they cover performers as diverse as Linda Ronstadt, Nelson Riddle and Jackson Browne I could play those all night long and unless you know Doug Sax if you were paying attention at all you would almost certainly assign the Doug Sax signature sound to some component in my system. Which flattering as that would be would be wrong.
The more transparent a system the less it imposes on the signal and the more it becomes whatever signal happens to be passing through. There's one record I could hardly stand to play through the first side. It made my system so unlistenable! Reading the jacket I discovered it was proudly recorded using all Mark Levinson electronics including some mixing panel he designed. So people who can't afford to have their lives ruined by his components can do it with his recordings, I guess.
The vast majority of recordings are of course nowhere near as distinctive as any of these. Which make it easy for us to be lulled into the illusion we are listening to the system we see, forgetting "the system" extends all the way back to the recording venue.
To pick any one component out from all of that, play a few cuts and know what it sounds like, man, them's some good ears.
The more transparent a system the less it imposes on the signal and the more it becomes whatever signal happens to be passing through. There's one record I could hardly stand to play through the first side. It made my system so unlistenable! Reading the jacket I discovered it was proudly recorded using all Mark Levinson electronics including some mixing panel he designed. So people who can't afford to have their lives ruined by his components can do it with his recordings, I guess.
The vast majority of recordings are of course nowhere near as distinctive as any of these. Which make it easy for us to be lulled into the illusion we are listening to the system we see, forgetting "the system" extends all the way back to the recording venue.
To pick any one component out from all of that, play a few cuts and know what it sounds like, man, them's some good ears.