Got the Feb issue of Stereophile in the mail a few days back and just really paged thru it while spending some time on the porcelain throne a couple days.
They really should have renamed this issue and maybe the whole magazine "The Vinylphile"
The first 45 pages are covered by Fremer's Analog Corner, Dudley's Listening, and Reichert's Gramophone Dreams. All in review and praise of everything vinyl and it's awesome SQ. Then after a article on headphones, yearly R2D4, and a review of a couple speakers, we get to page 105.
Way back there you'll find Dudley's review of the EAR Acute Classic CD player/DAC $6,795.
In it you'll find a (very rare for Stereophile) highly negative review calling the SQ grainy and edgy with artificial texture and fatiguing trebles. JA even rips it in measurements. OUCH, someone at EAR must have po'd the powers that be.
Then to wrap up the issue on page 115 Reichert reviews the Yggdrasil DAC. A quick overview will find Herb saying the $2k Yggi sounds OK and probably is as much as you should spend on digital playback, the High End 5 box market being out of hand. (the pot calls the kettle black?). In closing he says,
" Why must digital be so tedious, pedantic, and boring? Why must digital-even at its very expensive best-sound less real, direct, and tangible than a 7" 45rpm or 10" 78rpm?"
IMHO, What a completely upside-down and backwards picture of 2017 sound reproduction this whole issue presents.
The message being given by this issue is driven by the huge financial influx the "vinyl resurgence" has brought to just about every corner of the HiFi industry but is doing a disservice to the science of improved SQ for the future, and cheating the general consumer overall.
I know we have a number of vinyl lovers here and mean them no disrespect. Everyone is entitled to their preferences.