Yes, we are talking about aiming for high end performance, even though many here would disagree about my current equipment achieving such. There is a spectrum of performance from equipment, from that which is minimal such as car radios, which do a pretty good job of conveying some of the key elements of the musical message, to the absolute best in abilities for fidelity of reproduction. In the middle is a very murky, quite large area where equipment is nominally very capable, often quite expensive, but which very frequently fails, and fails badly to convey the musical message. This equipment, or more correctly, the setup of the equipment highlights every negative aspect of the recordings and makes the process of actually just straight out enjoying the playback very difficult.
So I'm talking about musically satisfying on the "better" side of that SQ chasm, where you can put on really dodgy recordings on highly ambitious systems, and still be carried away by the musical message. In my experience, the majority of more expensive audio does not get this right ...
Frank
