The great fear of upgrading goes like this: a truly revealing system will ruin half your library.

It seems logical. More resolution means more of everything — including everything wrong with the recording. Follow that logic far enough and the better your system gets, the fewer records you can enjoy. Who would sign up for that? 

Here's what I've found.

A mediocre system — or even a very good one on the verge of greatness that misses the mark — makes us wince. The hard edge on a bright recording, the glare in the upper midrange, the congestion when the mix gets busy. We reach for the volume knob. We quietly stop playing whole shelves of music. That wince is real, and most of us have lived with it.

But the wince isn't coming from the recording. It's coming from the system.

What sounds like a recording's harshness is usually the playback chain's own design failings piling on top of the recording's rough edges — hardness compounding hardness until listening becomes an assault. Remove the system's contribution and something remarkable happens: the recording's flaws are still there, still audible, but they stop hurting. You notice them the way you notice film grain in a great old movie — for a moment, and then you're inside the story.

That's the mark of a truly great system: it plays everything. In the Listening Lab, some of the most joyful listening happens with recordings nobody would call audiophile — early rock and roll, rough live tapes, mono jazz from the fifties. Do they sound high-end? Heck no, but they don't make you cringe, and you can relax and enjoy them.

So the goal was never a smaller library of approved recordings. It's the whole library, given back to you — every wince replaced with music.