I've experienced the same thing as Microstrip more notably on the front end. Most recordings just turned out to be real dogs but some, like Masquerade, the opening of Phantom of the Opera and one of my wife's favorites sounded brittle and compressed because my old CD player was having problems resolving the information. Switching to a single bit Delta Sigma player at 384 Fs and 5Hz to 25kHz power bandwidth (analog output stage built to be fast like say, a spectral) and instead of sounding mushed together the chorus spread out dynamically. I'm not saying you could now pick out every individual singer, what I'm saying is that the orchestra and vocalists were no longer crammed into the same space. This points, in my mind at least, improvements in time domain performance over my old player.
Okay, It's Christmas day over here and I promised to chime in and if not give some answers at the very least offer some food for thought. So here is my hopefully not too feeble attempt to do just that. Let's take a trip back in time.
It's been hypothesized that the reason we evolved to hear better in the horizontal plain is that both what our ancestors needed to eat and what wanted to eat or stomp on our ancestors lived on the ground. Gravity had more than anything else to do about that but you know what I mean
Low frequencies in rhythm means you might get stomped, Low frequencies sustained means you you're about to get eaten. Mid and High frequencies tell you where and what direction your chow is. Hard to argue with this hypothesis for sure. Whatever the case, be it a genetically encoded instinct or completely learned responses, while obviously it's a combination of both, identification is always made by association. Further, it has been proven that not just tones but more so the progression and combination of tones spaced in time, illicit universal emotional responses. These are the building blocks for musical composition hence music being the "universal language".
Now we're in the age and modern man is making music. The sources of sound aside from the voice are no longer naturally occurring phenomena. My mother graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Music Majoring in the Piano. Her Master's Degree was in English Communication from Columbia U in NY. (I've been asked this a lot but no I did not learn english as a foreign language from Sesame Street, thanks to Mom and Dad I was fluent by age four) I learned my musical instruments as a child as she would play Peter and the Wolf for me with If I recall either Peter O'toole or Richard Burton narrating. If that exact record my Mom played for us were still around you can bet that my brother and I would play rock, paper, scissors for it for at least 24 hours straight. I did not hear maybe three quarter of these instruments live until I was well into my teens but I knew what they were when I finally heard them. I only heard a Kornet Ensemble live for the first time 5 years ago but I followed the music into that square in Sweden knowing what they were since I had a CD of Proprius' Kornet Har Van Sila.
Context neatly laid out......Riddle me this Batman:
Why is it that a person can identify the real thing when the person has only ever been exposed to the reproduction?
