Jmaldonado said: "In my view, there's no such thing as "extreme detail retrieval". There is just the detail that every recording contains, and from that point you can only go down. The idea probably comes from the particular habit of some components to slightly emphasize the higher frequencies, as an attempt to make the transient sounds stand out over other sounds."
Atmasphere said: " The way you get 'detail retrieval' is to not create distortion. Distortion obscures detail. The way you keep it musical is by not adding subtle distortions that are sensed by the human ear as loudness cues (odd harmonics). Feedback as a source of such harmonic content; often designers will use feedback to get rid of distortion, but the price is a clinical or harsh sounding unit.
The other way things are kept musical is by not altering the tonal balance. To do that usually requires wide bandwidth. "
I could not have said better than above two explanations. It comes down to less than optimum component design and or lack of clean power source.
Excessive distorted high freq coupled with background noise/hash mostly is the culprit skewing the tonal balance producing highly fatiguing overtly detailed thin sound.
It IS possible to have detailed and yet transparent muscial sound.
Atmasphere said: " The way you get 'detail retrieval' is to not create distortion. Distortion obscures detail. The way you keep it musical is by not adding subtle distortions that are sensed by the human ear as loudness cues (odd harmonics). Feedback as a source of such harmonic content; often designers will use feedback to get rid of distortion, but the price is a clinical or harsh sounding unit.
The other way things are kept musical is by not altering the tonal balance. To do that usually requires wide bandwidth. "
I could not have said better than above two explanations. It comes down to less than optimum component design and or lack of clean power source.
Excessive distorted high freq coupled with background noise/hash mostly is the culprit skewing the tonal balance producing highly fatiguing overtly detailed thin sound.
It IS possible to have detailed and yet transparent muscial sound.