RomanticMoments

Totally agree. I guess what I was getting at is that the recording and even the format/medium can effect the imaging, ambiance, transience, etc.

For arguements sake, lets ponder how auto-leveling works... It is a compressed signal that takes the peaks (and in some cases valleys, like .mp3, for example) out of the signal and the result is a uniform signal. You still hear the frequency, but it does not have the same timbre as an uncompressed signal.

Hence why vinyl gets forever mistaken for ultimate SQ... People assume an analog medium means an analog recording. That's definetly not the case... For example, Metallica's Death Magnetic album was released on vinyl, but it sounds exactly the same as the CD because of the way it was recorded in the first place. Again, it comes down to wanting the same thing as the original artist

RomanticMoments

Oh, and to add to the problem, analog recording isn't even perfect... Just like no one speaker can accurately reproduce all of the frequency range, no one microphone can pick up all of the frequency range accurately. If you dig a bit deeper, MIDI really changed the face of audio, as it is an exact digital representation of whatever note is playing. However, a MIDI "C" guitar chord is not, and will never sound like, the "C" chord produced from an acoustic guitar. It is an exact representation, but the acoustics created by the venue and even construction of the guitar can't be matched by any digital signal, regardless of it's accuracy. Bottom line is SQ is rittled with problems, the root of it all being us users LOL