First, Nick Drake, in my view a rare talent and is set aside in my music life in a special corner which no other artist occupies. Being an artist myself and having the artist mindset (Although I am a "art" artist, painting, sculpture, design etc.) we all have the same inner "whatever" that allows us to create from thin air. Whether creating a painting or composing a song it is both created from nothing into something. Lots of artists out there are painting and lots of musicians out there writing and composing music. Nick Drake to me is so unique that I consider playing his music a treat. That said I now have to go into my review of this SACD "A Treasury". First off I have a very decent system and a very nice listening room I custom made just for listening to music. The room is 20x28 with 10 foot ceilings. My CD player is the Yamaha CD-S1000 and I'm going thru a Cary Audio tube preamp (Cary Audio is just up the road from me) and a McShane mod Harman Kardon Citation V tube amp and DH Labs ProAudio cables and a set of Peter Noerbaek tower speakers.
This SACD I tested for a good while and came away with the same end result. My experience with this CD played in the SACD layer sounded very compressed and boomy. Almost as if I was in an airplane feeling like my ears need to pop and clear. Every test session ended the same, I had listening fatigue and my brain was telling me to stop this. After many sessions I have come to the conclusion that this SACD is not something I can endorse. I feel as if all that there is to the SACD layer is a jacked up hotrodded version of the redbook layer that is "worse" than the standard cd layer. I get no pleasure from the SACD layer and cannot play it anymore on the SACD layer. To me the standard cd layer sounds better, less forced, and cleaner. On my system the voices are harder to hear cleanly on the SACD layer than the standard layer. There seems to be a droning ringing pressure in the room coming from the SACD layer, not there on the standard cd layer. Had this CD cost 60 bucks I'd be very upset. Being that it cost 15 I am not but I no longer will play this cd on the SACD layer, it just does not sound good and in my system, 2 channel only, I'll just play it on the regular redbook layer. Now, that said I have no view on the sound for 5.1 channel systems as I have 2 channel only so perhaps the 5.1 sound of the 5.1 SACD layer is very good, I cannot comment, I only can chime in my experience with the 2 channel SACD layer.
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