1) Clicks, pops and ‘vinyl roar’ from the plastic groove. Especially good fun when you know that the click/pop is about to happen.
2) The quality of information per second worsens as the stylus traverses the spiral groove. This makes vinyl the worst choice for what is loosely called ‘classical’ music, as climactic crescendoes are usually found next to the dead wax. There’s a reason that classic rock albums often have a ballad at the end of a side.
3) Almost no LPs have a spindle hole that is actually central. I cannot listen to piano music on vinyl, as I am sensitive to pitch wobble. Speed stability is dodgy even on super-expensive turntables.
4) Deep, powerful bass has to be summed to mono on LPs, lest the stylus jump out of the groove.
5) Both the record and your stylus wear with every play. Some stylus tips are significantly degraded after 500 hours.
6) Like a stopped clock, cartridge alignment can only be correct twice across the record surface. Linear-tracking arms have their own problems.
7) Pickup cartridges require huge amplification, resulting in noise.
8) Almost all LPs are warped to some degree (making a mockery of audiophools who like to adjust vertical tracking angle).
9) Terrible channel separation.
10) All pick-up cartridges have massively rising distortion above 10KHZ.
11) Many converts to vinyl are buying albums created from digital files, delivering the worst of both worlds. And at £20-30…
12) The only plus point is that 12” album art is big enough to be effective.
1) poorly designed phono sections can generate ticks and pops on their own due to poor high frequency overload margins. The overload is on account of electrical resonance above the audio band. This is an endemic problem- more often than not!
2) Variable groove spacing solved this issue back in the 1970s. If you have a decent pickup, no worries.
3) This sounds anecdotal. I can count on one hand the LPs I've encountered with this problem and wowing variable speed can give me nausea...
4) This is a non-issue. The fact is in nearly any room, bass below 80Hz is entirely reverberant, owing to the waveform being 14 feet long or more. I found that if you simply spent time with the project to sort out how to cut out of phase bass, no processing was needed- processing is used as a time saver.
5) Can't argue with this, although FWIW I have LPs that I played in my youth back in the 1970s that still play just fine.
6) If set up right distortion due to this issue is quite minimal, something no-one seems to hear or complain about.
7) Depends on the cartridge; strain gauge cartridges can be equalized and run into an Auxilary input, requiring no additional amplification. If you amplify MM or LOMC cartridges using differential gain stages, lower noise can be realized.
8) This sounds anecdotal as well. Anedotally, I rarely run into warped LPs; they tend to be years apart.
9) 35dB isn't bad- that means that one channel can be 1000x higher than the other.
10) This statement is false; likely the experience of someone who didn't do the setup right. It would be more correct to say that setup of a cartridge is its Achilles heel.
11) FWIW, when we would master an LP from a digital source we always requested a source file lacking the usual DSP, in particular compression. This results in a more lively sounding recording since most digital releases are compressed to get over road noise in a car. Its an industry thing; this means that LPs are often more dynamic.
12) It is indeed.