Guys with good recordings, who believe in listening to the recordings and not having a consistent color, i.e those who consciously set up for this an objective, rather than saying "my gear is transparent"... During your journey, what changes led to more of this difference, and what made the recordings sound more consistent across labels and pressings?
are you contrasting what made more of a difference with what made things sound more consistent? that is not clear.
i could see a very transparent system showing differences between recordings, by being
consistent at revealing all the information. that is my approach.
but i could also see your 'consistent' comment referring to 'sameness' across all recordings. which personally i reject.
i'll refer to a couple of threads i started from the last couple years.
i had the Golden Gate 1.5, and compared it to the Nagra HD dac with power supply, and the Aqua Formula dac. i found that i liked the Nagra HD dac alot, and really was attracted to it's 'liquid' presentation. but after listening to the Formula dac and then the GG again, the 'liquidity' of the Nagra seemed to be a 'sameness' over all the music.
i bought the Lamm ML3 and borrowed the big VAC Statements. compared them both to the darTZeel 458's in my system. loved all three amps. but the tube sound, when compared to the transparency of the big darts, got in the way of the musical message to my ears and imparted a degree of sameness to things.......as lovely as it was.
along these lines; taming my room a few years back by wall treatments, and solving my bass suckout issue, which unlocked the magic in many recordings and revealed their potential, to me was
the single largest step i've taken to transparency. i could point to various gear choices as also being significant, but honestly the room getting out of the way was the big deal. it was the quantum leap for me. after that lots of gear would have been effective at attaining transparency. and it allowed the largest scale music to be more listenable which allowed me to become more able to understand them and the individual recordings attributes.
when the room is in the way, anything you do has limited effectiveness as the distortion is in the way of the full picture.
secondarily, i would have to go back to my 2001 transition from 'hifi' sound of Mark Levinson amp and preamp + Wilson WP6's to the purity of Tenor OTL integrated tubes + Kharma Exquisite 1D's where i realized that coherency and transparency would bring me closer to the music. my current darTZeel-Evolution Acoustics direction is still in line with those lessons learned now 17 years ago. that step did allow for each recording to be more on it's own merits as the musical nuance and magic came through less restricted.