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...

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.