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Oliver, I do not think you understand "faithfulness" in the same way as I do. Ironically out differences of views are not linguistics but rather in the realms of objectives and intentions.

You are right and there are a number of companies who hide the formats faults: Linn CD12 or Forsell or  BAT VK5D or most of the CEC models and many would be as illustrations. Others do opposite and they throw in your face very sharply everything that is possible to get out of disk: CEC TL0, Burmester, in a degree some Mark Levinson transports, Spectral and others.

However, the "faithfulness" to retrieve everything from the format or even from a recording (or as people love to say “whatever microphone heard”) is not the "faithfulness" that I care. A recording is just a snapshot of live events, the events that reflect the idea of musical program, the composing and performing intentions. The faithfulness and credibility that I look is the faithfulness and credibility to the cores of musical super meaning. Would it be hard-reading CD transport of soft-reading is not important if the result is not viewed in context of everything else and in context of interaction with the main musical idea. I think to assess "faithfulness" of digital with the faithfulness of musical idea is like trying to assess a performance of aircraft with consideration where and how it will be used for.

Generally I also tend to use hard-reading transports but I try as much as possible to get rid the idea of CD. A raw digital file is fine but being placed in CD/DVD or any other “disk” format is become garbage. I think the inters problem with digital is not in the digital itself bit in industry intention to control distribution that made then to invent the CD, DVD, CASD and any other formats of “disks”. If we have even 44.1kHz at 20 bit of properly implemented raw WAW files then it is already so ahead of anything imaginable of any “disk” format that it might be truly “perfect sound forever”.

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