I'm right in the middle of auditioning a new set of software updates that will one day become a new mountaintop for the MK2 DirectStream.
Aside from the obvious traits like transparency, tonal balance, depth, and sweetness one would wish for, I am always on the lookout for stickiness.
Or, better said, the lack of it.
Stickiness is an odd phenomena I discovered many years ago in the era of vinyl. If memory serves it was at Harry Pearson's home (of the Absolute Sound Magazine). Listening to differences between our phono stage of the time versus the Audio Research wonder of the day, what really stood out for me was how the music became unstuck from the vinyl surface noise.
If you've not heard this phenomena it's a difficult one to explain, but once heard you cannot forget. On our older phono stage the noise of the record and the music were intertwined as one might expect when playing back vinyl. But switch to the Audio Research, the champ of that era, and suddenly the record's surface noise was separated from the music—as if departmentalized on a separate layer.
Turns out this stickiness applies not just to vinyl but digital as well and it's one of the traits I look for when auditioning music. Because there is no surface noise in digital, what gets unstuck is not the same, but suddenly the musicians are detached from the cloth and operating in a defined space of their own.
Imagine for a moment you are an engineer charged with figuring this out. What parameter of the circuit controls or even affects this attribute?
I am still working that out, but knowing the nature of what to look for means I can choose not to release anything that is sticky.
