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To cut a long and tiresome story short, what eventually made all the difference was improved filtering and reduced jitter in DACs. Yes amplifiers etc can sound different but not nearly as dramatically as DACs do. I'm a sceptic about a lot of the snake oil sold in the name of hi-fi but must concede that the apodising now employed by some (Meridian, Ayre, PS-Audio & others) IS a break through. I have over 11,000 CDs burned into the Meridian Sooloos system here (and that includes 1500 odd pop) and I no longer hear the awful "digitalis" I used to. Not that all are pristine recordings but many previously with "bad" stickers on the original CDs now sound fine.
Interesting observations - I'm generally sceptical about differences between DACs and amplifiers (excepting deliberately colored equipment), but it seems reasonable that there should be small differences between DACs. Still, the change you describe seems a bit overly dramatic to me (CDs that used to sound bad now sound fine all of a sudden). I'm in no position to judge your findings, but I suspect that the change you have observed *could* have been caused by one of the following:
a) Your previous system was colored in a way that made CDs sound poor,
b) Your new system is colored in a way that makes recordings sound "right" to you, or
c) Psychoacoustics.
As said before, I'm in no position to judge, especially since you clearly are serious about music - 11'000 CDs is quite a collection!
And, as always, if it sounds good to you, it
is good.
On a side note, I've once done a comparison between the three DACs I've had at hand at the time: The Squeezebox touch, Meier StageDAC, and my Marantz CD player. I've used some recordings I'm familiar with, not particularly "audiophile" ones, but still of decent quality. In short, I simply could not find the slightest difference, even though I tried.
Now of course this isn't conclusive at all. Just as expectance bias can work towards the listener hearing a "distinct" difference between two pieces of equipment, my (negative) expectance bias could have led me to the conclusion that there was indeed no difference...
After this I have also done a less direct comparison between the StageDAC and the Marantz over a prolonged time. This time I was quite sure that I heard a difference - I'm just not sure how much of it was psychoacoustics/placebo.
For comparison: The StageDAC sounds to me very detailed, a bit lean and with treble that tends to be a bit sharp. My Marantz CD player on the other hand, sounds to me slightly less detailed, darker, smoother.
Now if you'll take a look at the two devices: The StageDAC is silver in colour, smaller than most HiFi devices, and has sharp edges on the chassis. The Marantz is black, bulky, with smoothed edges.
... See the similarities between perception of sound and visual appearance of the devices? Light/silver colour is commonly associated with bright sound, whereas black or other dark colours usually lead to a darker sound (or perception thereof). Silver and Copper cables (and the perceived changes they make) are a popular examle of this phenomenon.
Of course this does not have to mean anything, it may very well be that both devices actually do sound as I perceive them and the similarity in the visual appearance is just a coincidence. Who knows?
Regarding CDs in general, I used to be very careful about the quality of a recording. I went as far as not to play certain bad sounding recordings anymore, even if I liked the music. Took me a while to realize how immensely stupid that was. Then at some point I just stopped caring. If there are different versions of an album to be had, I'll still take the time to select the one that sounds better, but other than that I'm perfectly satisfied with even the worst sounding recordings. As long as the music is any good, of course
There's a nightmare scenario that I'm particularly afraid of: A world where music lovers exclusively listen to Pink Floyd, "audiophile" recordings and reference test tracks. *Shudder*
(nothing wrong with Pink Floyd by the way, just an example of popular well recorded music)
