Is revealing always good?

Recordings are works of art that should be reproduced as accurately as possible fbofw.

Those old paintings by Michelangelo are showing their age. Someone should do something about that. 😏

I recently bought a very revealing and transparent CD player (and AVM player). Because I listen to redbook CD's and 705 of the CD's I listen to are jazz recordings from ca. 1955-1963 the recordings often have bad "digititus." The piano's ring, clarinet is harsh, transients are blurred --- just the nature of the recordings. With a revealing CD player, all this was palpably evident so much so that at least 1/2 those CD's were rendered unlistenable. Now, with a cheaper, more colored CD player (a new Creek) --- not nearly as revealing --- one that "rounds off" some of this digititus, these CD's are again listenable.

So... is revealing a particularly good thing for redbook CD playback? I think not. is "colored" always a bad thing? I'd say no. At least for CD playback. Thoughts?
Robsker

What you are hearing in your playback system is high levels of distortion that appears to you as "revealing". People have come up with ingenious names for distortion & "revealing" is just one of them. You have some inexpensive component in your system & you also have high distortion loudspeakers that are making many of your CDs unlistenable.
Once you replace the offending electronics & convert to a time-coherent speaker (which is minimum phase over most of the audio bandwidth. When I say most i mean something like 200Hz - 8 or 10KHz) all your CDs will become listenable once again. The bad recordings from the early era of Jazz will still be bad recordings but they will be listenable & you will enjoy the music from them.
So, no "revealing" is not good because it signifies distortion/high levels of distortion.

That would be an excellent argument for going back to boom boxes.

Bombatwalla, excellent explanation. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks,

"Once you replace the offending electronics & convert to a time-coherent speaker (which is minimum phase over most of the audio bandwidth. When I say most i mean something like 200Hz - 8 or 10KHz) all your CDs will become listenable once again. The bad recordings from the early era of Jazz will still be bad recordings but they will be listenable & you will enjoy the music from them."

I wish that were the case, but its not always true. Sometimes you have the system set up properly, and the CD's still sound bad.

"So, no "revealing" is not good because it signifies distortion/high levels of distortion."

That sounds a little extreme. Some people pay a lot of money for components that reveal more of whats on the recording. I don't see how you could call that distortion at all. Are you sure that you're not confusing revealing with poor timbre? For example, if you have a system where a cymbal sounds like someone dropped a piece of metal on a concrete floor, that would be a problem because timbre is wrong. It has nothing to do with how revealing the system is. You could even argue that a harshness in the high frequencies is less revealing. (Assuming, of course, that the recording itself is not at fault.). In a case like this, more revealing would mean having a system that can properly reproduce timbre so a cymbal would sound more like a cymbal, than noise.

Another way to consider this issue, and I suspect this may be what you are referring to in your post, is that you can have a "mixed bag" of components. For example, maybe you have an amp that produces a high level of detail with little distortion, with a preamp that does not. You then have a situation where one well designed component, shows the flaws in another.