Is revealing always good?

"01-28-15: Czarivey
Why d'u think women have cosmetic pouch handy?"

They may need to powder their nose. Why else?

"01-27-15: Maplegrovemusic
lots of variables . To blame sound on one piece of equipment is not accurate ."

That's correct. Even though you changed the CD players back and forth, and left the rest of the system unaltered, other things could be going on. Components don't always match well together. If you put your revealing CD player in 10 different system the sound will vary. Most likely, it will sound very close to what you are hearing now, in some of the systems, but in other setups, it can sound very different. That's why its so important to listen to components before you buy them.

"So... a theoretical question for all... do tubes (in a pre-amp or the CD player) color and obscure the digititus that is on the disk and thereby give a smoother more listenable presentation?"

No. Any time you buy tube products just because they're tube, in an attempt to fix a problem, you're just asking for trouble. Same thing with cables. Buy components based on how they sound. I know some people will disagree and say buy tubes, and my answer to that is, you can get lucky. Tube products vary in how they sound, every bit as much as SS does. Focus on what the end result needs to be, or you won't get one.

Right now, your situation seems to be OK with the 2 CD players. I do the same thing. I have my nice, high end components with my Wadia CD player set up for the best sound I can get, and for bad recordings I use my Arcam 33. Its not a perfect solution, but it works.

Another thing you may want to consider, depending on how much of your collection is poorly recorded, is to just have a 2nd system set up to be very forgiving.

"Once you replace the offending electronics & convert to a time-coherent speaker (which is minimum phase over most of the audio bandwidth. When I say most i mean something like 200Hz - 8 or 10KHz) all your CDs will become listenable once again. The bad recordings from the early era of Jazz will still be bad recordings but they will be listenable & you will enjoy the music from them."

I wish that were the case, but its not always true. Sometimes you have the system set up properly, and the CD's still sound bad.

"So, no "revealing" is not good because it signifies distortion/high levels of distortion."

That sounds a little extreme. Some people pay a lot of money for components that reveal more of whats on the recording. I don't see how you could call that distortion at all. Are you sure that you're not confusing revealing with poor timbre? For example, if you have a system where a cymbal sounds like someone dropped a piece of metal on a concrete floor, that would be a problem because timbre is wrong. It has nothing to do with how revealing the system is. You could even argue that a harshness in the high frequencies is less revealing. (Assuming, of course, that the recording itself is not at fault.). In a case like this, more revealing would mean having a system that can properly reproduce timbre so a cymbal would sound more like a cymbal, than noise.

Another way to consider this issue, and I suspect this may be what you are referring to in your post, is that you can have a "mixed bag" of components. For example, maybe you have an amp that produces a high level of detail with little distortion, with a preamp that does not. You then have a situation where one well designed component, shows the flaws in another.

"04-06-15: Bombaywalla

I wish that were the case, but its not always true. Sometimes you have the system set up properly, and the CD's still sound bad.

Zd542, i might have to disagree with you here - i've found that once you setup a system which has minimal distortions (for a particular budget i.e. $), then, well-recorded CDs sound good. The ones that continue to sound bad are the ones that were badly recorded, are compressed & have other maladies."

I should have been more clear. You're right. If you get everything setup properly, the recording itself is what will hold you back.