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The analog thread.


Hopstretch

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The main problem back in the day was that phono stages were generally crap. Indifferent RIAA accuracy, poor overload margin, and high distortion. I have a circuit of a '70's period ortofon MC phono stage somewhere that had an array of parallel 680uF 3V tantalum bead capacitors between the cartridge and the (100 ohm) load. Ugh. Ugh, ugh uuughhh! And it was not cheap.

An even modest quality phono stage now runs rings round that sort of nonsense.

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Yep to both you and WInk, though my impressions of the Stanton vs. the Shure were reversed.

I wish I wouldn't have tossed the Shure (maybe I didn't? Hmm, have to look). I always liked that cart on a Thorens (TD160... never tried it on the TD320 I have now).

Back in the early '80s, when my wife and I had first married and moved to the Dallas area, I had brought my beloved (at the time) Infinity Monitors (Walsh tweeter) with me, but nothing to run them with. I went out and bought a Hafler amp/preamp (big stuff back then :) ). After going thru a crap Sony Linear turntable that liked to drag the cart across the grooves periodically, I bought the Thorens 320 (online out of NY). I bought a HO MC cart that I liked a lot, think it was an Apogee? Searching I find no such cart or info about it. At any rate, it was a good sounding cart, even thru the crap phono stages back then.

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11 minutes ago, Grahame said:

Meanwhile ...

https://hdvinyl.org/

"In 2016, Mr. Loibl had this crazy idea to make vinyl records with lasers :-)  We simply called it HD Vinyl."

Really?

Really. Read about it at axpona. The weird thing is you have to convert the original recording source to digital, which then gets converted into some kind of 3D topographic map which then feeds the laser based cutter which then makes the stamper :(

ill take my non HD AAA sourced vinyl just fine. 

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Pitchfork article

https://pitchfork.com/news/high-definition-vinyl-is-happening-possibly-as-early-as-next-year/

The slashdot comments seem to echo your view 

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/04/12/2320221/high-definition-vinyl-is-coming-as-early-as-next-year

a couple of choice ones

"This scheme is a shoe-in for the 2018 "polished turd of the year" award."

"

Or.. now hear me out on this one... or ... we could just, you know, send the digitally converted audio, you know, without converting it back into a bumpy piece of plastic.

I know this might sound radical, but it seems to me that converting analog sound to digital format then to a digital 3d map then to a laser-cut stamper then to a piece of bumpy vinyl then to a vibrating stylus and into a varying electrical current to drive an amplification system to run the speakers that you listen to might just be a little more complicated than just taking the digital format for storage and transport and converting that back into analog sound at playback."

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Yah.  I mean it makes absolutely no sense.  Maybe you get the noise floor a little bit lower? And maybe I guess you technically can squeeze in a little more dynamic range? For whatever those gains are, I think the fidelity loss due to all the extraneous conversions is totally not worth it.

With that said, digitally sourced vinyl can sound good, such as when they use a hi-res digital copy of the original analog tape and use that copy for the stamper, but the whole HD vinyl thing is wacky to say the least.

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1 hour ago, Grahame said:

I know this might sound radical, but it seems to me that converting analog sound to digital format then to a digital 3d map then to a laser-cut stamper then to a piece of bumpy vinyl then to a vibrating stylus and into a varying electrical current to drive an amplification system to run the speakers that you listen to might just be a little more complicated than just taking the digital format for storage and transport and converting that back into analog sound at playback."

You could make it slightly more complicated with the help of a laser turntable.

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