Just reporting what my source told me. It was a hot topic the previous (school) year, but apparently all the interested parties got their turntables and it's no longer trending. She's not about to give up her Spotify subscription for a turntable, if you ask me.
My answer: No, the romance isn't dead.
Words out of my mouth. There is still room for error in buying into boutique companies who flaunt their stories and styling more than their specs.Hmm but it’s still so much desinformation out there so it’s still hard to do properly, most audiophiles still overspend on source components and buy to small and to expensive speakers and use no kind of room correction.
But this is also why it’s all dwindling to irrelevance. Any noob looking in to audiophiledom from the outside must be thoroughly confused . So I disagree somewhat
Flaunting my old school credentials.
I do love more tactile controls and analog meters of various sorts. The latter is something I especially wish were still incorporated. I hope to retrofit some lesser CRTs I'm not afraid to burn-in into some sorts of visualizers. I hope to incorporate an analog VU meter into my setup someday, too.
I too would love for maximum practicality to be standard. The less mass by default without sacrificing ergonomics of controls, the better. I'd rather pick my own visualizers and controls, whether physical or digital, than pick between those integrated into the DAC or AMP. The more I can focus on specs and forgo bloated mass that doesn't help the experience, the better. Though, I'll likely never long for wireless tech all too much, my tendency to be a latency-freak being one reason.
Admittedly, I myself own just one small (and currently unused) vintage receiver, while I just spent the past day geeking out about Moode audio player running on Raspberry Pi, it's 12-band parametric equalizer, support for GPIO-connected buttons and touch screen.
That looks awesome, but I'll never forget the time I was gifted with a Marantz 4400 quadraphonic receiver and discovered it was too big to fit onto any of my shelves, and was relieved when the former owner decided he wanted it back (this was in the 1980s and long before anyone dreamed of charging 3000 USD for the things).
50 lbs of receiver.
Two are for tuning; one for sensitivity/signal strength, the other to adjust to the center of a channel. I used the FM tuner of that receiver a lot.
TRIO/Kenwood was, first and foremost, a radio company (still are, at least, I think they still are!) -- and they took their radios seriously.
DSC_9935 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
I have fond memories around Kenwood receivers. The director of the children’s choir attached to the same church where I was singing in the Gregorian schola cantorum (Saint Quentin’s in Leuven, Belgium) was by day producer at the Belgian Radio. He’d just bought a Kenwood receiver and B&W speakers, and invited some of us to come and listen to a transmission of Bach’s Matthäus Passion he had recorded in the local music academy (I had been asked to sing in the choir as they were short of basses; the Evangelist was Louis Devos, a then famous Belgian tenor who gave one of the most impressive performances of the role ever, with a stunning rendition of “Und siehe da, der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück...”, absolute weak-in-the-knees stuff). No doubt the circumstances and my memory of the actual performance contributed, but I was totally bowled over by the sound quality (of an FM broadcast!) and for quite a while, Kenwood and B&W were the equipment I aspired to. I must have been about 18 in those days.
