Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

It used to be that every single receiver or preamp had a built in phonostage.  The way it used to work is that you would by a turntable, plug it in, and start spinning records.  For the audio enthusiast, there was always low output moving coil cartridges, and the resultant step-up-transformer you could use to present a signal to the phono input, but the built in was always used.  When the CD came to dominate, that the good 'ol built-in phono input went away.  A minor proliferation of external phono stages began as analog declined, but it left the mass market's consciousness as the silver disc rose in domination.  Given the people sticking to their vinyl through the near death of the medium were mostly performance oriented enthusiasts.  The state of the art playback for analog rose considerably (both in performance and price) during this dark time.  Now that vinyl is beginning to flirt with becoming mainstream again, brands are introducing their own ta...

There is a current puzzle in audio since the introduction of CD. While the measurements of digital are in many cases an order of magnitude better than vinyl (and audio  Skeptics  are fond of gleefully pointing this out), yet in the end, vinyl tends to sound more natural and more real most of the time (which subjectivist use to rub the Skeptics nose in it). While we don't need to rehash the millions of words lost in the ongoing argument, I think it is easily summarized by three statements below: The audio Skeptics have made a basic assumption that digital audio reproduction is essentially perfect, and have stubbornly maintained this idea The audio Subjectivists have not adequately defined high resolution well enough to inform study. Neither Skeptics nor Subjectivists have been able to acknowledge that our understanding of sound perception is incomplete and its study and revisions are ongoing.  This is either through ignorance or stubbornness. In a perusal ...