Trade offs?

You need to do one of two things...

Either start using a nice tube preamp, DAC, or CD player to smooth out the sound and soften the highs, or buy a turntable, cassette deck, or other analog source that doesn't sound harsh.

If the majority of your recordings sound harsh, then it's your system or source component, not your recordings.

BTW, how is the quality of your incoming AC? Do you at least have a good AC line filter or power regenerator?

I guess I can agree with Tvad that it is possible that the majority of your recordings are poorly recorded.

That said, there is also the possibility that you have poor AC power or a component (even wires) that is making your system sound that way.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to investigate the cause. If it's a particular component, or trashy AC, those things can be addressed. If it's simply the poor quality of your recordings, you can buy some better sounding ones. If nothing is wrong then you can move to tubes or a less resolving system to help soften the harshness.

Aball, I'm 100 percent with you on what you said about systems and recording quality. Congrats for explaining it better than I did. :)

Mr Tennis,

Let me be clear about this. Yes, you can have a high-res system that sounds "musical," and you can even more easily have a "high-res" system that makes a lot of recordings sound poor.

But the two are not mutually exclusive... you just really need to know what to do in order to set up a system to be both extremely musical and extremely revealing. It is my experience that a lot of so-called "high-res" systems that are so revealing that they make most recordings sound bad are actually systems with "high-res capable" components that are put together in such a way that they lack the synergy needed to sound musical. It's a big complicated equation... how may of the variables have you addressed and how many have escaped your scrutiny?

My system is exposing more detail than it ever has, and it sounds very musical at the same time. So, as I said, musicality with high resolution is an attainable goal. Some audiophiles have apparently attained it and some have not.

That said, the redbook CD format has a definite resolution ceiling and floor, but it can sound quite detailed and musical within its envelope. One need only look at the many comments from 'philes who know CD as a first language and were disappointed when trying to get equivalent or better performance out of a turntable-based system.

Wide dynamic swings, low-noise, and low-bass extension are the CD format's good points, while great analog excells at midbass through high-frequency definition. It seems that the highs can be smoother and more extended with vinyl, and that is the basis for a lot of what we audiophiles perceive as "fine detail and/or immediacy."

I've been told that the Chesky downloadable HD tracks are very promising, but have not been successful at setting up that system as yet. Hopefully I'll be able to check it out in the future. To date, I've had no luck getting Chesky to answer my e-mails about system requirements or set-up issues. They seem to do a lot of promoting, but are not at all good about answering e-mail regarding trouble-shooting their software.