SIGNALS

Buy it! After all, everything sounds so much more "warm" and "natural" when played on acrylic plastic! /s

I'm of the opinion that if it makes you happy, it can't be half bad. Start cleaning that vinyl collection, and get it out of the heat.

Turntables are crude high-noise, high-distortion low-tech garbage from ancient times. If you are into audio nostalgia, that impulse would be better satisfied by an investment in an original gramophone with a pretty acoustic horn that you can polish to your heart's content.

For musical enjoyment, stick to a universal optical disc machine. Mount your precious LPs on the wall or sell them for a killing to naifs who think analog LPs are better than CDs (or any digital audio.) Meanwhile, Mark Waldrep (he of AIX Records fame) has found that native 24/96 is indistinguishable from CD in a rigorous double-blind test of over 400 different listeners. And CD has demonstrably better resolution than any analog recording medium.

It's all about sci-incerizin' and engineer-icizin', son. Don't let them Dark Siders corrupticate yer brane. Grow-up, and Live-up t'yer title, Mister Perfesser Man. Them LP-Lovin' Dark Siders is insane in the Mem-brane (insane in the brane).

I’ve thought about the LP a lot. When I was a kid we had a mono set-up through a black and white Motorola TV that had a RCA audio input. I can’t remember the brand of old record changer we had, but you could play everything, that would be 78’s, 45’s and LPs. You could stack ‘em too, which we did.

My dad had an old “battleship” sized Pentron reel to reel. I wasn’t even 10 and I was already getting the music bug. This was in the sixties. I became obsessed with the Lafayette and Allied Radio catalogs. I began to figure things out when I got a Garrard record changer of my own and soon thereafter a Wollensak 6300 reel to reel tape deck. Sound was about capturing precise variations in air pressure; vibrationally in records and magnetically in tape. Both mediums had to move past a “pick-up” which could turn the fluctuations into electrical energy. There must be enough of this “stored representation of music” extracted for a fair representation of music to be realized using these electrical amplified “sound waves” by the loudspeakers.

I’m over 60 now and I still love audio gear. Sometimes at my age I like to see and touch it more than use it which seems strange indeed. I went through all of the above because I feel the best way to get audio is often the most simple approach. Isolate what matters and do it well, likewise remove everything possible otherwise. I think this A-T turntable has that aesthetic in looks and engineering. It all comes down to the record groove and the needle (uh, stylus). Get everything else out of the way as much as possible save for providing a non-resonant (at audible frequencies) platter ran at exact speed. This set-up shows tremendous potential in this regard, especially with the Shibata shaped diamond as it has more contact over a larger area than other shapes. $1200 is not cheap, and Project, for one, has a compelling tables at about half the price. But, without any high and mighty talking heads comments on the actual performance I simply see something that probably gets that 95% of what is possible out of a recording at a price that many can shell out. The only question, of course, is if my gut is right. That said I still own a AR XA because of these reasons.