There's an old saying "a rising tide raises all boats". And when you apply this to a new piece of equipment, it's kind of what you'd hope for, right? That new piece of kit makes everything sound better and gain an equal, yet better footing in terms of musicality. An across the board improvement.
But sometimes new processes, equipment and technologies improves only one area of musicality or another. This too is valuable although perhaps a bit more surgical in nature than a huge overall improvement.
The tendency of DirectStream, as an example, to dramatically raise the musicality and information retrieval level of CD's is somewhat out of proportion to the same changes with high resolution audio discs and DSD; as if the bottom of the bar was being raised up in disproportion to the mid and top of the bar.
This is not necessarily unique to DirectStream, we've seen it in an emerging few pieces as well. What this leads me to is simple and surprising: the need to purchase higher resolution copies of our existing libraries is decreasing when it comes to the bulk of our collections. Decreasing to the point I have little interest in upgrading my library for any purpose other than demonstrations or making sure I have the greatest chance of nuance retrieval from a handful of discs I treasure.
This really open up an entirely new paradigm for those of us with reasonable sized libraries.
I like to think of it as closing the gap.
