Recently a question was posed to a WBF member who is a dyed-in-the-wool digital lover if he thinks that we have gotten to the bottom of all the information that is contained in the LP grooves. His answer was a typical digital lover/analog hater answer in that he was dismissive of analog and he stated that we are not capturing any more information from the grooves as tables, tonearms and cartridges have improved.
The fact remains that those of us who never abandoned LPs and have continued to improve the quality of our tables, arms, and cartridges know this is simply not the truth. Every time we make a real improvement to our LP playback system, we are rewarded with hearing more information from the grooves. And for those who abandoned LPs long ago and their mid-fi table/arm/cartridge is lying broken in the bottom of a closet somewhere in their house to tell us otherwise is more than a little presumptuous on their part. The commonly heard saying that “I’m rediscovering my LP collection all over again” after making a major improvement to their LP playback system resonates with us that understand what that really means.
I continue to be perplexed by those who abandoned analog long ago that they are pretentious enough to continue to have opinions on what we hear or don’t hear even though they have no idea of what we are hearing. I for one don’t think that we have gotten to the bottom of what is really encoded in those grooves. And that for me is part of what makes this hobby exciting.
The fact remains that those of us who never abandoned LPs and have continued to improve the quality of our tables, arms, and cartridges know this is simply not the truth. Every time we make a real improvement to our LP playback system, we are rewarded with hearing more information from the grooves. And for those who abandoned LPs long ago and their mid-fi table/arm/cartridge is lying broken in the bottom of a closet somewhere in their house to tell us otherwise is more than a little presumptuous on their part. The commonly heard saying that “I’m rediscovering my LP collection all over again” after making a major improvement to their LP playback system resonates with us that understand what that really means.
I continue to be perplexed by those who abandoned analog long ago that they are pretentious enough to continue to have opinions on what we hear or don’t hear even though they have no idea of what we are hearing. I for one don’t think that we have gotten to the bottom of what is really encoded in those grooves. And that for me is part of what makes this hobby exciting.