The ALFRs, with their high accuracy, have rendered many of my favorite tunes unlistenable. I wanted to believe the most recent example of this was a nasty resonance with the ALFRs but it turns out this was just another latent defect in a tune I've always enjoyed.
The offense starts at 3:29 into Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene Part 2. The on and off ringing from that point on is unmistakable. Once you've heard it, you never want to play that song on the ALFRs again - at least not at room-filling sound levels. The ringing is there on all of my other Axioms at a significantly attenuated level but I never tuned into it until the actives shone light on it.
As I discovered, this tune uses high Q settings on analog synthesizers for some of the effects. Q is a measure of resonance. As the Q becomes very high, "...a whistling sound is heard at a frequency exactly around the cut-off point and, on some filter designs, going to the highest possible resonance makes the filter begin to act as an oscillator, creating its own (sometimes very loud) whistling sound."
This is the price you pay for more accurate sound.
