I enjoyed this article, thank you.
For those who enjoyed this article may I recommend to you what I think is the most passionate explication of our hobby every written? Please see this piece by Edward Rothstein in The New Republic, published December 30, 1985:
https://whatsbestforum.com/threads/...th-of-the-cd-and-the-miracle-of-the-lp.17951/
(Digital devotees should feel free to ignore the very early CD criticism embedded in the essay.)
I read the article you referenced and would like to quote a couple lines here (adding a few of my own) that I wish the recording industry would pay attention to before it is too late (if not already):
”… when recordings were made in the early days of stereo in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (generally believed to be the best recordings ever made), … three microphones were used and were fixed in place and amplitude.”
”…the basic approach for all the processing of sound on records was the same as that used by Edison a century earlier. The grooves of the record contained minute wave forms that were ‘analogues’ to the wave forms produced in air by the sound. The record was a physical map of physical waves.” The objective of the recording was to get grooves in the record to mirror the physical waves hitting the microphone, and then to recreate those sound waves in real space as close to the real event as possible with the playback equipment available at the time. Remembering that LPs can last many years, perhaps for a century or more, the information is in the grooves, improvements in playback is the route to uncovering such.
”…digital recording … changes the wave form into a series of numbers, each number specifying a sonic location of some kind.” Each sonic location is converted into a sound, then each sound is played in succession at a rate fast enough to approximate the live event. The size (detail) in the sonic image and the speed at which these sonic snapshots are played back is the technology, but also the limitation. “The only way to raise our current technology’s limits would be to come up with an entirely new digital system” (there are many now). Such requires a replacement of all your hardware and software every time there is a new digital system.
The selling point of vinyl is that the vibrations from the live event, if recorded properly, will be recorded somewhere in the grooves, limited only by the technology of our playback equipment, and because “technology (for vinyl playback) is infinitely perfectible”, we only need to periodically upgrade the hardware.
As time goes by the ever-increasing sophistication in playback equipment will draw ever so much more from those record grooves in our cherished records and bring us ever so much closer to that live event.