The value of open space

Chashmal, Having spent a full day with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Paris in 1975 at a master class, and having later scored in a very minimilistic and pointillistic style, I know exactly what you are referring to. It is of course worth remembering that the use of 'silence' as a palpable sonic element in music is not terribly new, but goes back to the dawn of human history. I can't comment on Vinyl's ability of texturing the 'false void' with reverberating echos of decaying harmonics as analog has not been my chosen medium since 1984. On the other hand, my system currently rigged with an Esoteric X-01 limited, a Rowland Capri pre, Rowland 312 and a pair of Vienna mahlers does exactly what you are suggesting. . . It makes me profoundly aware of the difference between the untextured lack of sound between tracks and the musical magic of the venue during a pause or a slow decaying sostenuto. I venture to suggest that while it is likely that both good vinyl and some very good digital may yield the exceedingly low level information present in structural 'silences', in reality each component in the chain contributes to the effect. It is perhaps the interplay between the various components that create the magic. I have played the 2nd movement of Dvorak's Symph No. 9 under Bernstein and the Israel Phil for years. . . little I knew that at the very end, just before the solo chords of the mid strings there exists a horrid engineering splice, where the sound engineer cuts short the decay from the previous ascending arpeggio and inserts a little fragment containing a couple of seconds of dead silent hall followed by the aforementioned chords. I heard this clearly only a few weeks ago for the first time. . . had I just gotten a new CD player? Not really, rather, I had inserted the JRDG Capri and the 312 in the chain. I also was able to detect to some extent the same engineering problem using the Nuforse Ref 9 SE V2 instead of the 312, but not when I had the ARC Ref 3 in the chain, nor when I was using my trusty old Rowland 7M monoblocks, nor when my speakers were still the lovely MagnePan IIIAs. . . . all of this, in my admittedly limited experience, seems to be suggesting that analog vs digital may be -- at least in this particular area -- a red herring.

Hi Albert, I'd love to finally listen to your fantab system! . . . I'll be in Dallas from June 28 through July 6th . . . any chance of visiting with you?

Yes, you are correct Chashmal, new music makes a much more structural use of silence than old music did. The problem of bad digital/analog is that the silence becomes opaque. . . simply devoid of signal. . . the mythical black background is eventually found to be not that black after all, if the right equipment is applied in the chain. I am experiencing significant textured silence in my system with the digital X-01 Limited as the front end. I am glad you are experiencing the same through the anolog LP12. Whether I were experiencing 'better' textured silence than you or viceversa, is of course a rather meaningless question, for which there is no meaningful answer.

Chashmal, lots of excellent CD players out there, e.g. Audio-Aero Prestige and Capitol Classic, TEAC X-01D2, etc. . . . . . and then there are all the multibox players

Hi Chashmal, in NYC there are the usual suspects. . . Lyric Audio, Sound by Singer just to name a couple of them. . . they have lots of gear to show. . . but can on occasion be prickly to deal with. Between them you are likely to be able to listen to the top gear from TEAC Esoteric, Audio Aero, EMM, DCS, and a few others. Bring your own CDs. Not sure if they do in-home auditions. By the way, Audiogon has a fabulous long-lived thread for discussing top-flight digital gear where you will find mountains of good info/opinions: try:
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?ddgtl&1126769860&openusid&zzGuidocorona&4&5#Guidocorona
The thread is approx a dozen pages long. . . but it's worth reading it from the very top. Guido