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In the Forum: Analog Playback
In the Thread: Today's best turntables vs. greatest vintage turntables.

Post Subject: Back to the futurePosted by steverino on: 11/1/2013

I would say that there are advancements where you would get far more unanimity on the progress that had been made than one would do for audio after the development of tape. I don't think anyone would want to go back to cylinders. So there are advances that can reasonably be said to be definitive. However, with turntables, amplification and speakers we are much more uncertain as to the degree of advancement over what was around in the 40s and early 50s. A major part of the problem is that we don't have a definitive practical criterion of success eg travel faster than the speed of sound. Our goal is to decode some object or data file and retranslate the information back into the original audible sound. But no one for a moment thinks that the recording faithfully captured that sound in its entirety. So what was irretrievably lost in the recording process? We can only attempt to discover that through playing it back on some imperfect audio system. By playing it back on thousands of imperfect systems we gain an approximation to what is lost by determining what is not retrieved by any system. However, the next system we play it on may recover some attribute that we thought lost. But it recovers it imperfectly and so on. All that can be said is that an optimal vintage system can recover an astonishing percentage of information that a modern system does. Sometimes it seems to recover more but only under certain circumstances.

I suppose my summary view is that most of the advances have been in areas of material development not directly related to audio signal decoding/translation. We can better isolate components from vibration, EMI and the AC grid. Of course that means little if you are running battery powered gear with the components physically isolated from the speakers. Electrical components like capacitors maintain specs better etc. Digital has permitted a more rigorous surround sound decoding as well. Other than that I think we are more in the realm of sonic flavors than sonic truth (with truth defined as the exact recreation of the original sonic event.) The continual rediscovery and reimplementation of vintage designs points in that direction. I'm not even sure of Mr Matucci's claim that the cartridges of today are unequivocally more accurate than vintage cartridges (with diamond styli and microline type profiles.)

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