Heart wants what heart wants. Why should we select our audio gear solely by the quantifiable utility value they offer? We don't do that in many other venues of life either. Especially when it comes to selecting our friends (not to mention our spouses), applying a cool rational benefit logic is usually seen as highly negative character trait.
You are the ‘ideal’ customer for a snake oil salesman.
Keith
AMEN Keith!
Why is it from the very beginning the pursuit was called High Fidelity?
Striving to recreate a musical event in the home with the best possible reproduction available at the time.
If playing back your music on a table top FM radio is "good enough" for you, that's fine.
But it's not what the engineers have worked so hard to create for us, and what we who care about the direction of this "hobby" have supported.
If you enjoy playing Edison Cylinders, 78 Shellacs on crank victrolas, RCA 45 big holes, what ever, have your fun.
But none of that has been about the direction of this passion since Edison shouted into the first horn.
The funny thing, for me, about records (FWIW): there are, literally, several thousand of them here*, and decent albeit not world class playback hardware, too -- bit I rarely play any of them any more. The reason is simple: too much effort! Still, today, the easiest resource, for me, i.e., the quickest, easiest way from urge to listen to something to actually hearing it, is to spin up a CD.
Same here except that back 20-25 years ago I made TOTL needle drop digital recordings of all my LP's then sold them off.
Now with hindsight I wonder why since I can't remember the last time I played any of them.
90% of the time they have been replaced with better sounding remasters from todays genius's such as Steven Wilson, James Guthrie, or Andy Jackson.
Or have been reissued in clean, detailed, discreet Quad, 5.1, or Atmos, etc recordings..
Time marches on, why would I mess about listening to old snap, crackle and pop?
This to me means the snake oil business writ large is devolving further. Stereophile has, sensibly I believe, decided that it's better to take a traffic hit than to annoy advertisers or potential advertisers (as @Mart68 correctly points out above) whose oil they are shining in hopes of selling an ad.
Good post
@teched58. I don't know if its very telling of anything but just today I received my July 2025 issue and it's the thinnest one in recent memory, 114 pages. If the snake-oil business really is devolving the trickle-down of support for the cable and vinyl business will follow. The success of the vinyl industry has been mainly created by the lies and BS published there and alike, "digital sounds bad" has been spread there to the point you hear it repeated every day in the Joe Sixpack world. Vinyl Sounds Better can be heard and seen just about everywhere. "a lie told often enough becomes the truth" is the sad result. Why else are tons of folks buying $100 pressings of old analog recordings, enough to grow and spread an entire industry?
So it is possible to track pretty large bass excursions on vinyl, system willing, although admittedly a digital format could handle limitless excursions since it is non-mechanical.
Not unless it's mono'd. Try doing it with the source more than a few db out of L/R balance and see what that would do to you needle. LOL
Digital could place it anywhere you'd like from a hard L or R stage position to anywhere in a Atmos soundfield.
