@PeterA. I need to put this word down before I forget. The past two days I have been fine tuning my cart setups, the Opus1, MS and GC. The GC is now showing its great dna by the way. What I find the vdh does better than others that I have heard is it sounds so very "un-congested". So un-congested to the point it makes even the Opus1 which has greatest strength in area of dimensionality and space feel "congested" when listening big orchestra comparing to the vdh.
un-congested ... that's good Tang.
I like this term and found myself nodding my head to it when reading the above and thinking of descriptions of the vdH MS, particularly when listening to large orchestral music. My agreement was immediate, intuitive. Maybe I will use this word.
Then I asked myself, if I used 'uncongested' in a description of the Master Sig, would someone who has not heard the cartridge know what that description meant?
We do well with visual description and many of the same words and phrases we use for that we try to apply to sonic description, eg. coloration, transparency, etc. I find much of our attempt to describe sound is via
connotation which is not explicit or literal, but implied or associative. It's worth saying that associations and implications may include a cultural factor, something usually not found with denotation.
The burden of un-something falls on that which it is not. Un-congested or uncongested depends on its reader having a notion of
congested. I haven't heard the Opus 1 and until now I have not heard someone describe it as congested, however, per Tang it can feel (sound?) congested when playing big orchestra - when, and this may be important, compared to the vdH. Okay.
That's all good - so what do these words connote?
Tang mentions dimensionality and space, then
@PeterA picks up on that saying "space is better with GC. Much more open too." So they find a quasi-visual connotation. I speculate most of use know that traffic can get congested - crowded, packed, choked, bunched up. There's fewer cars an hour after lunch, less congestion, etc. Look out an office window and see the congestion. etc. Pick another example of congested and see where uncongested takes that.
I'd like to take this a little beyond spatiality and dimension, a little beyond the visual.
We say big orchestral music because not only can the sound be big/large but because there often is a lot going on at once. Lot's of different instruments playing at the same time and often some of those instruments are in the same general frequency range. More of this from dense Brahms choral music going forward. Get into the likes of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc. and we find eruptions of simultaneous multiple lower brass (horns, trombones, baritones, tubas), lower strings (bass and cellos), and percussion (cymbals, timpani, bass drum) , etc. Similar with large choral assembles with all voices singing at once.
Where I find the Master Sig uncongested - and here I want to switch from 'un-' to positive description - is its ability to follow multiple musical lines with clarity, definition and timbral naturalness, while maintaining the proper dynamics of each instrument as defined in the score. The better reveals why it is better. We may not grasp that the QRW cartridge is congested until we hear the VDH parse everything going on in the lower mids and upper bass and we hear and follow all the different lines from the rhythm section with greater timbral and dynamic clarity. Even when playing at the same frequency we can follow. I hear it when my focus is expanded to take in the music as a whole, or when I follow the basses or trombones. You, or at least I, get this in the concert hall and there the visuals confirm it (not cause it.) We might think of this as some form of instrument separation but imo it goes beyond spatial separation.
To me this
un-congestion is one of the great strengths of the Master Sig.
