I remember the publication of this article well, and was a subscriber to TNR. At the end of 1985, my hifi consisted of Quad ESL57 speakers, a pair of Futterman (by Julius) H3aa mono OTL tube amps, a New York Audio Labs NCP-2 preamp, a Tandberg 440A cassette tape deck, a Mitsubishi CD player, and for phono I had two Luxman PD-444 DD turntables -- one with a circa 1970 Stax UA-70 tonearm and a variety of MC phono cartridges including SPU, Koetsu, Denon, and also a VPI HW-19 belt drive with a Souther Engineering linear tonearm. I worked with Lou on the development of that tonearm. Cartridge for that was a Denon DL-103D MC and sometimes a Signet TK-10L MM. During the rest of the '80s and into the '90s, I was buying a new CD player about every year, in a quest to find good sound from CDs. I was living and working in the Boston area at the time, and made frequent trips to NYC for many reasons, but often made my way into Lyric HiFi. I heard that ~$90,000 system.
Now throughout the '80s I also had a share of season tickets for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in famed Symphony Hall. Seiji Ozawa was musical director and conducting in those years. I also grew up in southeast Pennsylvania and got to attend Philadelphia Orchestra concerts in Philly when Eugene Ormandy was conducting -- from 3rd grade through the end of high school. I mention this for context to say, I got the hifi bug early and had a solid reference for what a live symphony orchestra sounds like. I also worked in hifi retail during college and graduate school at the birth of "High End" in the 1970s. I saw the debut of TAS and was reading Gordon Holt's Stereophile years before that. And while I'll say that the continual refinement of high end analog audio was yielding revelations in realism almost quarterly for awhile in the mid-1970s, none of it was even the barest approximation of hearing music performed live. And arguably today, we're only a little closer, even if you spend $2M and build a concert hall for the system.
In inflation-adjusted terms, Mike Kay's $90K system from the mid-'80s is now equivalent to about $271,000. Today, *real* rich audiophiles would just be getting started at a quarter-mil. But by 1985, high-end audio and hifi in general was already being undermined by the upside down economics of a then-shrinking overall hifi market as other interests competed and became more accessible. In the '70s, everyone had some kind of hifi. By the mid-latter '80s, hifi began fading from domestic scenes. It hadn't disappeared, but by 1985/6, if people visited, there'd be some comments like "...you still do this?... In 1975, an audiophile interested in the emerging hig-end could imagine owning The Best system, over time, by buying one component at a time over some interval of time. By 1985, that was no longer true. Unit costs per "best" components became in the aggregate beyond most people. The article author is right about the striving nature of high end audiophilia, but he was also writing concurrent with the end of broad-based high end hope on the part of buyers. High end audio as Pearson defined it was broadly exciting circa 1975. The traffic into high end stores was demographically and econometrically much more diverse than it was by 1985. Once average interested people could no longer hope to own the best, gas started leaking rapidly from the balloon. The constituency became stilted.
Digital offered some hope for some reflation. A lot of people really were over the rituals of LP care, the noise(s), the quality deviations, the general fussiness of turntables/tonearms/cartridges and they were more than ready for the CD. The sound, though. Initially thrilling in its way; quickly fatiguing in new ways people hadn't experienced before. Still, the discs sold. But a portion of the hifi dreamers just decided if this was supposed to be perfect sound, then there was no point to sacrificing to climb the hifi ladder. They lost faith in vinyl and in digital, but found digital majorly more convenient. By the time the first personal CD players like the Sony Discman came out, and cars came with disc players, people could widely agree, "...well, it's good for this."
What the TNR writer couldn't know in late 1985 was that the engineering class wasn't sure about what was wrong with CDs and 44/16 sound. There were a lot of ideas but not a consensus. Upsampling, resampling, filters, variable dithering. I remember there was a time when we made CD music sound better by transferring to analog tape to listen -- tape hiss provided some useful dithering and masking to tame the high-sonics artifacts. There wasn't really a lot of progress until about ten years later, with the explosion of high end DACs and drives (Wadia, et al). Meanwhile, after the turntable almost died, new design physics, hypercritical machining & materials science launched a turntable rebirth suited for high end audio alone, since in the '90s only the high end customers left could afford the step function upgrades coming to market. But digital had a long learning curve for an industry having to bend to discernments of listeners instead of measurements exclusively.
Once digital designers got serious about investigating musicality and engineering for it, digital made a ton of progress in the 2000s and 2010s, albeit at some challenging prices for buyers not heeled for the high end, and then the Chinese and Koreans got in the game. So the irony is that vinyl has since progressed incrementally, while digital improved by intervals of leaps and bounds. The first major label, mass commercial digital recording released was Ry Cooder's 'Bop Till You Drop' in 1979, before the CD, so on vinyl only at the time. It was recorded on a 3M digital tape recorder. There was a lot of excitement around the release when it debuted and I bought the LP the week it came out.
The pressing was clean and quiet. The sound was icy and off-putting. Now I have vinyl that had mediocre recording an mastering that sounded bad from day one, but the sound improved as analog playback improved over time. But there is no turntable/tonearm/cartridge nor phone preamp today that can make a vinyl copy of 'Bop Till You Drop' sound acceptable, let alone good. Want to hear it much better? Play that crappy, spiky-sounding '80s CD copy on a modern, musical DAC. Still flawed but much better than you can get having a phono cartridge ride the analog undulations in plastic, that captured the digital origins.
We know now that not enough was known about implementing 16/44 digital in the '80s to make it musically tenable to us. How? People are building -- or buying -- 1980s and '90s R2R DAC chips out of mediocre old CD players or finding scrounged NOS of same, to make organic sounding, musically satisfying DACs that just weren't convincing encased in a vintage '80s CD player. Compare any '80s Philips CD player with an MHDT DAC with the same 15XXA chipset, fed by the digital output of any CD player that has one, and you'll think you're hearing two entirely different technologies.
Today, I listen about 50/50 vinyl/digital. After a lot of fits and starts, in the 2020s we got realy good streamer options and they don't all cost a fortune. We have a plethora of musically-authentic DACs. I have maybe 6000 CDs and a similar number of vinyl LPs. A Bricasti M21 Platinum DAC made the distinction between vinyl and digital moot in terms of music enjoyment. That's not to say that real, discernible, meaningful, qualitative differences don't persist. They do, and I appreciate both. But it took until 2022 for me to appreciate and enjoy either, equally, when source quality is the similar.
Meanwhile, the writer's SOTA turntable looks the same as then but sounds better today, and that has nothing to do with what wood the base wrapper is made from.
Phil
