Has Myles introduced us to a new audio term - Dynamic freedom?

[Johnny Vinyl]

In reading Myles' wonderful review of the Anne Bisson-Blue Mind R2R tape in Positive Feedback I noticed he coined one of its attributes as Dynamic Freedom. Maybe I've been living under a rock (which is quite possible), but I have never heard that description of sound quality before. From reading a little further he describes it as "free from harshness". I suspect he used that term since this was a digital recording transferred to analogue (if I'm not mistaken). Frankly, I quite like the term.

[Hugh]

The way I understood it is Free from Constraint or Compressed.
May be Myles can chime in here to tell us what he really meant? :-)

[Johnny Vinyl]

You could be right Hugh! And yes, let's hear from Myles!

[Hugh]

:-)

[MylesBAstor]

Hmmm....not sure it was intended but now that John picked up on that term and the kitty is out of the bad!

One of the biggest sonic differences between tape and records (this gap is closing as time goes on) is in the low end. Here the tape simply has a sense of ease and dynamics that used to really elude turntables. The newest tables, say such as the VPI DD, are however making big strides in this area. And even more than tables and arms is the cartridge--and not to forget--the phonostage. Of the many cartridges that I've heard here, only two--the Atlas and A95--begin to do justice to that low end sense of ease. Maybe the Atlas is 80% or so of the tape and the A95 slightly less?

But dynamics are a complicated issue and represents the sum total of many things in the system including power supplies, watts, electricity, acoustics, resonances, driver compression, efficiency, etc. Take watts for instance. Doubling the power only results in another 3 dB in volume. But....and this is a big but....that additional power can bring that sense of ease that no matter what (others here might talk about how horns can accomplish the same goal) the music, it sounds like the system is cruising along. That was much the situation when I had the Cello amps that put out over a kilowatt into my Martin Logans. Nothing but nothing fazed the amps or the system.

The truth though is that I had knowingly sacrificed dynamics for microdynamics for years because I felt the latter was far more important for musical reproduction And maybe it is depending upon the type of music you listen to. But while we can't necessarily have everything, I have finally found a great balance between microdynamic resolution and macrodynamic authority. More to the point, dynamic freedom maybe goes one step further beyond "ease" encompassing both dynamics as a sense of volume level as well as frequency. Simply the lack of strain in the system. And accompanying distortions.