When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Well take all my comments as a collective up to now Dynamic range, surround sound etc. They all contribute.

LP's have technical problems that make them somewhat problematic for surround BUT even they could be enhanced by surround. Atleast the companies who spent all that money developing quadraphonic thought so.

But what DPLII does is remove the nasty edge off the CD which for anyone is an irritant. This glare is the reverberant field that is collapsed on the subject/ stimulus of the reverberent sound, whether it is artifical or captured by mics. Two channel cannot properly release this energy which will cause tension.

On the very same system if I switch from surround to two channel a definite edge and glare present themselves. (I have found tubes make this worse(probably not universally though))on CD players, as most tubes are added to soften the sound, but instead they emphasize the problem by adding more noise to the signal and simply blunting the glare.

"It is the relaxation quotient of music." If the music is meant to be relaxing then yes you should be relaxed. One cannot stretch out and relax to The Crystal Method's Vegas unless one is allowed to become detached from the music. Maybe relaxation and the ability to detach oneself from the recorded performance is what you really mean. Surround will not allow detachment as well as two channel. A tweeter that is a bit gritty is like a stick snapping in the woods you will react to this on a base level.

Where I can find a direct conflict with digital not performing as you describe is the people who produce recordings that are DESIGNED too have a "relaxation quotient" seem ambiguous to the medium it is replayed on and if its digital or not. Its just an observation from googling so I can understand your position better. The obvious touche' would be they don't recommend listening in surround either. :)

"muscle-testing digital" I googled it, but if you can point the most relevant study. It would be helpful. Lot's of things on prostates.

I engage music actively it is why I use very accurate flat response loudspeakers. If "enjoy" is too "relax" and "escape" then ultimately CD+surround does this for me.
We are all different, so are physiologies could be at odds. BUT! what is not at odds is the surperiority of surround playing back digital.

Are you a bit of a tinkerer or are your speakers bi-wire capable? We can try an expiriment

Yes, according to a recent study by M. Borzatta and Aloysius Q. Schmaltzenstein Gavronsky, published in the last preprint of Lancet&Dunset, runaway digital jitter can in fact produced significant swelling of the prostate through the formation of pre-cancerous nodules. As the study was based on a very small sample, the team headed by the above researchers is now planning to expand it, and is seeking more volunteers in the audiophile community of the state of California.

Guido,

You would think that there would be more runaway jitter in a carstereo head unit than an audiophile system. Plus the head unit :(, is closer to the affected area.

My Cdplayer is kept at a safe distance if you know what I mean. :)

There is likely to be more raw jitter in a car stereo. On the other hand this is also likely to be cancelled by the extremely poor S/N ratio in the car. Furthermore, being the jitter signal in question in the acoustic domain, rather than in the RF domain, placement of the CD's electronics in close proximity to one's gonads is not expected to exacerbate the situation.

Having just checked my references, it is at this point unclear if the mutagenic gonadotropic effect of runaway digital jitter is at all limited to the acoustic domain, or if instead it is generated in the RF domain, and what its effective range may be. IT is interesting to note that, if a vinyl disk were produced from an early digital recording which exhibited runaway digital jitter caused by problems in the recording or mastering equipment, playback of such disk on a purely analog rig would be as deleterious to the listener's integrity as listening to its CD counterpart.