I'm old enough to have designed with vacuum tubes then transitioned to transistors and other solid state components. Believe me, I don't miss the heavy high voltage transformers. Vacuum tubes are still used in guitar amplifiers (I love my VOX guitar amp) because of the very unique types of distortion they can produce when over driven. Can't get anything like it from transistors. Early on, push pull transistor amplifiers were needed because of the power limitations of early power transistors. One of the fun things I did was to design a 500W peak, 230 continuous watt class A stereo amplifier when better power transistors became available. The heat sinks were massive and I used a cooling fan. Great specs, sounded great. I think I still may have it in my junk pile. BTW, the quality of a digital recording (like on CDs) is related to the sampling rate. I believe CDs used 44.1ksamples/sec or about twice human hearing. Really need to get it to at least 4x human hearing at 14 bits. 8x is better. Much higher than that is overkill and you'll start to have problems finding systems, especially speakers that can accurately reproduce it. Also need young ears in an acoustic chamber to hear the differences.

Largebob, just a clarification or two. The sounds we perceive are analog in nature, but they may or may not be sine waves - they may for instance be a single pulse with a fast rise and fall time which looks very much like a square wave. Secondly those digital pulse trains from the C/D are converted by a D/A converter in the player back to an analog form, which just like the vinyl, may or may not be sine waves, but the idea that we are listening to square waves is not the case (unless, of course the original recorded sound was a square wave). What is correct is that tube amps and transistor amps, in addition to having different characteristics when over-driven, often have different distortion characteristics (I can add more detail if you like), resulting in a different “sound” which can be measured and quantified by a spectrum analyzer. As to vinyl vs CDs - whichever you prefer is the right choice for you.

"The masses" People who are on this site and others like it and who own DSLR's are not the masses. Cellphones are the camera of choice for "the masses" That consumer is not interested in schlepping around a camera bag full of "stuff" there is no anguish over ISO, Aperture or any concern for the best light. They take the picture they instantly share it with friends, family and those recipients also have the same lack of concern for settings. They are looking at a nice picture. They are happy it is a nice picture. They are not concerned about backups or spending vacation time editing pictures.
We have 5 children. Only one has a DSLR. He gave me his D610 and he bought a D850. That comes out to 20% the other four use their cell phones. The older grandchildren less one all use their cell phone. That one I gave my D90 to when his father gave me the D610. He was not using the camera to take pictures at Christmas.
My take is there is no sustainable growth for these camera's like in the past. There will be pockets but "the masses" they have moved on.

I understand this is “audiophile heresay”, and I expect a heated response, BUT pretty good audio? In every measurable way, from dynamic range to frequency response, IM, THD, transient response, S/N, channel separation, and any other objective and quantifiable measurement, CDs are superior to vinyl, not to mention SACDs. This from an audio designer that listens exclusively to tube amps (and CDs). I understand that you can hear the difference. Can you also hear the difference in AC power cables to your amplifiers? Sorry to be argumentative, but I hear this so often. A good friend who owned a serious audio company and mastered everything with high-end Ampex dbx encoded professional decks at 15-30 IPS (before moving to a Sony digital encoding system) had this advice about 30 years ago: “buy the least expensive CD player with a name you can recognize and you’ll be able to immerse yourself in the music without being distracted by the inevitable noise of vinyl, which ruins the image and the illusion” if you love the sound of vinyl, spent thousands on a turntable, thousands more on a cartridge, more on an excellent phono preamp, a cleaning machine, granite base for the turntable, disc “clamp” and maybe even signal processing (I know that’s a dirty word) to increase separation, S/N or noise reduction, and dynamic range (that are all lacking), then God bless and enjoy your music.

Yep, the high voltage transformer and associated chokes ARE heavy - the HV supply for the amps I mentioned weighs about 65 lbs. Completely agree about the performance of tubes vs transistors when overdriven - it’s for that reason you still find tube microphone preamps in many high-end recording studios, even today. Regarding the sampling rate, while 44 KHz is adequate to accurately reproduce the highest typical audio frequency we hear (per Nyquist), higher sampling rates mean the filter on the output of the D/A can have a more gentle slope, resulting in lower distortion. Again, I know this is WAY off-topic, but I couldn’t resist.

Cheers

The biggest flurry of research, development, and design/manufacturing improvements in 110 years of phonographic history took place in the last five years or so of the commercial lifespan of vinyl recordings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Building on the final generation of phono cartridges and turntables by Bang & Olufsen and three or four others, and by significant improvements in vinyl disc recording and manufacturing by Telarc, MFSL, and a couple of others, a final generation of truly innovative and outstanding albums and replay equipment came onto the market for a short while. I still have two turntables and a number of these "ultra high quality recordings." They still today offer sound that is not fully attainable even by the best CDs or other digital formats. (Although x.1 sound systems are really impressive and fun and were never achievable on vinyl.)

It didn't matter. The public spoke (loudly), and not too much later, vinyl disappeared from the commercial market, almost overnight. The CD, which started as an audiophile curiosity and broadcaster convenience, ended up democratically providing "pretty good audio" to the masses. Fortunately, CDs are good enough and provide enough real benefit that the real audio hobbyists did not lose out entirely. But it wasn't our (audiophiles') choice. It was a choice dictated to us by masses of less experienced and less well-informed listeners, but which fit very nicely with corporate business models.

There are portions of the DSLR/mirrorless debate that parallel the vinyl/CD history and portions that do not. I, for one, am watching with great curiosity to see what happens and to see how well what we finally get matches up with what we thought we wanted. Right now, I'm not overly excited by ILMCs. I think that they just represent something less than the hype associated with them. Once a critical mass is switched over, the manufacturers will probably settle into a maintenance mode with much slower development and improvement. So I'll stick with what I have, at least for now. A time may come when I wear out or lose my current DSLRs. If I'm still interested in and able to pursue photography, I'll either buy a used antique or a new "whatever is current," whichever seems to make more sense at the time.

Thanks, Tri-X! Truer words were never spoken...

I’m amazed at how expenditures inform “beliefs”. I worked with very high end studio gear in the 1970s and early 1980s. Digital audio beats all the vinyl and analog tape equipment I ever used.

Like you, I still like tubes — in analog to digital interfaces, analog preamps, instrument amplifiers, and home amplifiers. They add some controllable warmth (musical-sounding harmonic distortion).

But vinyl? Yeah. I still have all my LPs and 45s from high school and college, and a great turntable. Some of them I have on CD, too. The CDs generally sound a LOT better.



There’s a reason a lot of the best music from our youth has been re-mastered and re-issued on CD. It’s dynamic range. Mastering for vinyl was FULL of compromises to avoid surface noise and over-modulation distortion and cross-talk and...

The result was, engineers compressed and equalized and limited the signal — THEN ran it through the RIAA curve before cutting a master. The result was a fat-but-flat sound with limited high end fidelity.

Even a stock Mac with GarageBand and a Universal Audio Apollo A/D interface can record pristine audio better than the best analog tape gear of the 1970s. No added hiss... minimal distortion... no wow and flutter, flat frequency response to well above 20 KHz... choice of dozens of plugins simulating classic pro audio processors... If you WANT that vinyl sound, you can still get it, on CD, via software.

The other thing that galls me is hearing 55+ year-old men talk about how they prefer the sound of vinyl over CDs. Test their hearing, and most will learn they don’t sense any frequencies above 13 KHz or so. They probably have significant midrange loss, too.

High end HiFi has always had a generous share of snake oil salespeople...

Thanks, Tri-X! Truer words were never spoken...

I’m amazed at how expenditures inform “beliefs”. I worked with very high end studio gear in the 1970s and early 1980s. Digital audio beats all the vinyl and analog tape equipment I ever used.

Like you, I still like tubes — in analog to digital interfaces, analog preamps, instrument amplifiers, and home amplifiers. They add some controllable warmth (musical-sounding harmonic distortion).

But vinyl? Yeah. I still have all my LPs and 45s from high school and college, and a great turntable. Some of them I have on CD, too. The CDs generally sound a LOT better.

There’s a reason a lot of the best music from our youth has been re-mastered and re-issued on CD. It’s dynamic range. Mastering for vinyl was FULL of compromises to avoid surface noise and over-modulation distortion and cross-talk and...

The result was, engineers compressed and equalized and limited the signal — THEN ran it through the RIAA curve before cutting a master. The result was a fat-but-flat sound with limited high end fidelity.

Even a stock Mac with GarageBand and a Universal Audio Apollo A/D interface can record pristine audio better than the best analog tape gear of the 1970s. No added hiss... minimal distortion... no wow and flutter, flat frequency response to well above 20 KHz... choice of dozens of plugins simulating classic pro audio processors... If you WANT that vinyl sound, you can still get it, on CD, via software.

The other thing that galls me is hearing 55+ year-old men talk about how they prefer the sound of vinyl over CDs. Test their hearing, and most will learn they don’t sense any frequencies above 13 KHz or so. They probably have significant midrange loss, too.

High end HiFi has always had a generous share of snake oil salespeople...