All recording is artifice.
It is good to know what you like to extract musical enjoyment and to seek this out. There is nothing wrong with a fabulous lie if it gets you where you want to be.
It will be fun to see where you end up.
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I have 2 speaker/amp combos, both fed from the same sources (digital, and pretty clean and revealing).
One pair is wide range, clean, and quite revealing.
Good recordings sound really good (obvs example “The astounding Eyes of Rita”). Poorly mastered and or middy and muddy recordings sound exactly that.
The other pair is old, soft, with a presence peak around 7kHz (natural, not eq) and a warmer bass-mid. The poorly mastered and middy muddy recordings are much more enjoyable played through this amp/speakers.
I can switch from one to the other without pulling cables.
I don’t bother eqing, I just switch from one to the other as appropriate and I can enjoy a much wider range of music as a result.
So don’t change your speakers, just get some more 
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Watch this review. He literally addressed exactly what you’re looking for! It’s a not a DAC but a streamer with a DAC, which could help your case!
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Great review…as always from Darko.
Thanks for sharing.
Also consider that audiophile recordings can sometimes fail to show you issues with your system. Or possibly another phrasing would be that audiophile recordings have a wider tolerance range for tuning. Violins do not turn into cheese graters, you are trying to recreate guitar distortion in a good way (which is difficult). To my ears classical and jazz are gentler. You could very well have a mismatch, like a bad Ethernet cable (please don’t say you have a Cat7 shielded cable and therefore have united your ground plane with your network gear), suboptimal interconnects or speaker cable pairings.
Even though the audiophile recordings sound good, it is a bad sign if you put on a respectable modern recording and it sounds like trash. In my experience modern recordings have less tolerance for large mismatches and if you make most modern recordings sound good you are well on your way. Chasing lots of “air” and excessive amounts of unnatural instrument separation will butcher modern recordings. This makes sense as there is not such a thing as pinpoint instrument separation at a live acoustic event… this is artificial sharpening similar to jacking your TV brightness all the way up.
Side note it could be that you have to play with isolation of your gear and it could fix everything. I’ve had great luck with bamboo cutting boards.
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Come on. For this to be such a major issue for you, there have to be more than a few recordings you think sound bad. Please list a few so we can better understand what you are hearing and so we can listen for ourselves.
Most of my recordings are 1965 to 1985 rock. Are there any rock albums in that range that are particularly bothersome?
Cambridge Audio are a great company, employ and hire some fabulous engineers and have been making people happy for 50+ years.
Personally, I think with @dancingsea 's views on most recordings he should get a Devialet Reactor 900. I’ve been listening to mine most of the weekend, it’s really enjoyable, levels out most recordings, goes really loud and is portable.
Having sold his audio system, he can then go to lots more live concerts, which is what music is all about. He may have to wait 6 months, and I am painfully reminded every time I am in my office as our music calendar is firmly stuck in March. At least there is a nice picture of a duck to look at.
There are a few harsh realities:
- Even at it’s very best, home audio is only a pale imitation of the real thing.
- The DSD DAC when reviewed was not particularly resolving. In fact when reviewed by Stereophile it did not resolve better than CD quality. I’ve not seen any reviews of the DSJ or any more recent DSD DAC reviews, as magazines are not going to bother with reviewing software upgrades.
- Ted is first snd foremost a software engineer. People seem to like the DSD and DSJ DAC’s because they sound more analogue. That’s a PSA house style, hence the Analog Cell. However, analogue is about warmth, not resolution. The best analogue is I think equivalent to about 14 bits or resolution.
- I have tried DSD. I used an Audiolab MDAC+, a very good DAC that cost me £650 new compared to the DSD I considered at £6,000 and actually measures better. The best news is that I sold the MDAC+ to a guy in Germany for £700 because I did not like DSD. I tried a few recordings and the problem one was Shostakovich Symphony No 2, Liverpool Philharmonic under Petrenko, the opening was impossibly quiet and I then got blasted. And I have have speakers that are extremely good with low level sound. It had too much dynamic range and frankly needed to be compressed. It might work for people with 100% insulated music rooms, but not in my house.
- DSD sources and DSD upsampling seem to me to be different things. DSD upsampling is a software thing and may improve the sound from 16/44 recordings.
- It is very rare in my experience to play a recording that the sound, as opposed to the music, is unpleasant. The most common is with piano depending on where the microphones are positioned and the amount of room included in the recording. I like close, but not too close.
- I listen quite a lot with a $70 Zorloo ESS 9018 inline DAC, in high resolution streaming Qobuz from my phone via the usb audio pro app that bypasses the phone’s DAC, into MrSpeakers Aeon headphones. This $70 DAC is more than sufficient to tell between good and not-so-good recordings.
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Well, the CSP3 has adjustable input and output gain and allows two sources in single-ended RCA configuration. By adjusting the input and output gain you can tailor the system dynamics and “weight” to the sound–you can add body to a thinner recording and a bit of liveliness to a duller, thick sounding recording. And with the many tube types and brands you can use the sound can be further enhanced tonally and dynamicaly. The 25th Anniversary power supply bypass mod further increases the unit’s transparency and the efficacy of the tailoring and sonic benefits. It’s also one of the best headphone amps I’ve heard especially for dynamic drivers. I try to do without one in my system as a preamp but my system is better with it even though I also use a Decware ZTPRE which is very similar but with torroidal transformers, solid state rectification, three inputs and fully-balanced operation and remote.
There’s no doubt that a CSP3 will change the sound of your system. My guess offering a lot of flexibility and improvement. But. . . if you really do feel that your system is presenting excellent recordings wonderfully and you want to see if you can make lesser recordings sound better, I honestly think to that end you’ll find more success with the ZROCK2. I have about 30,000 cds. I like to listen to airchecks and home and field recordings that I have collected over the years of jazz artists. Having the ZROCK2 in a system expands the listenability of the collection. It has become a centerpiece of the systems. That’s why I recommend it specifically for the problem you have brought forward.
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Here is one of my particularly egregious examples: Journey, “Greatest Hits” on CD. (Don’t have any metadata handy at the moment)
FWIW
I’m late to the party. As i was reading I too was going to recommend the Zrock2. Lon beat me too it by a day+
I say the Zrock is one of the best components I’ve ever used.
When I sit down I front of my stereo i want to stereophonic experience where I’m lost in the music. The Zrock2 opens up more opportunities for this to happen.
For people who are purists or want the truest reproduction. The Zrock might not be for you.
If you want to get lost in the music and keep saying one more record/ one more track until the sun comes up. the Zrock might be the ticket to that adventure.
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I am very suspicious of many greatest hits CDs!
I have very rarely found a remaster that sounded better than the original with modern music. Even greatest hits albums sometimes have altered tracks that have different DR values compared to originals even though the discs don’t say “remastered”.
I don’t believe DR has much to do with SQ, almost guaranteed though if it’s not the original it sounds worse with less tone and sounds EQ’d.
Yeah, well…this one stinks; even though it contains a couple of favorite “anthems” from my adolescent youth.
Scott
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I would try to track down the original CDs
But the 80s were not a good time for digital… maybe better luck with cassette tapes 
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I remain struck by the concept there are mainstream CDs which sound so bad people are unwilling to listen to them even though they like the music.
Certainly there are good and bad sounding CDs. But I struggle with the idea a CD I otherwise enjoy would remain unplayed merely because of its sound quality.
How system dependent is this phenomenon? Is the sound so bad you cannot listen on any system? You can listen on anything but a reference system? It is OK on ear buds, but intolerable otherwise?
As a sound omnivore I have never experienced this, be it an ancient 78, 1980’s digital, inexpensive hand-held recorder, cell phone.
There are, however, plenty of recordings I cannot listen to because the music is dreadful.
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agreed, music above all else
it’s only the technician in me that baulks at sound quality, not the music lover, though i can understand its annoyance.
Amen, brother. Amen.
Don’t worry @Elk, I think it is a concept limited to @dancingsea. I think it’s just a symptom of too much listening to the system than listening to the music.
I can enjoy music very happily on my main system, my little Devialet Reactor and a Pure Evoke-1 DAB radio that I bought about 15 years ago.
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This is easily done though, given that many audio sites and magazines go on, and on, and on about the quality of reproduction.
Some music recordings (quality of mastering) aren’t that good. That’s well known. You make the best of it. This happens in remastered versions, originals, etc. Some artwork doesn’t come out as intended. Same thing, appreciate it for what it is. I’d rather have accurate equipment and accept the shortcomings of the recording than mask it and pretend it’s something that is isn’t. My primary listening is via headphones. Headphones are very revealing.