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.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.
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
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.