I changed my avatar.
I liked the old photo, but I sold that Glass TT a few years ago. It was a lovely kinetic sculpture and an adequate Turntable. It was awkward for me to use at my advancing age with the lid and the way it opened.
So being a gone thing it was time to change the image.
It was worth a fair bit of money. What I got for it basically covered the two new TTs I bought and those phono cartridges. Right now I am at break even.
That is a nice side effect of buying old classic stuff. You can get back most of your investment. In the case of the old Glass beast I made a decent profit. I had the thing for decades.
The full size picture of the current boss TT is here.
This is the Phase Linear 8000 / Pioneer L1000a Linear tracking TT with the Grado Opus Cartridge. Very neat and clean and easy to use. Oh and it sounds really good.
I remember one thing that stood out in early CDs was how quiet they could be. LPs were assumed to always tick and hiss a bit. I remember those days. Most old electronics had "rumble filters" to reduce the background bearing noise and foot falls. I am playing mostly old (40 years plus) LPs and they are basically silent with this beast. Occasionally there is a tick or something. Once in a while there will be a woosh of noise for a second. Probably from a drop of spilled drink at some party decades ago. Generally the background is silent.
I still have a way to go in comparing those CDs to their respective LPs, but some other things have firmed up.
Most of the sacred knowledge of audiophiles is just opinion. It is really hard to distinguish different from better. It is important to distinguish that. A lot of products are recommended because they sound different and that difference is liked. I have come to believe that most of that opinion is on very shaky ground.
I have a hard specific example noted in an earlier post. Those "tesla" tubes I got sounded really nice. They definitely added an interesting character to the sound that I liked. Read my initial post under "tubular dude". Insert rant that electronic devices that should perform the same electrically "sound" different. Logically that should not be.
Logic is a rare thing in high end audio.
BUT I know now that sound was from a mechanical flaw in the tube construction. They were VERY microphonic. The sound of the music got back to the preamp and vibrated the tubes which in turn vibrated the tiny metal parts that do the electrical job which in turn modulated the signal. As the preamp was about 10 feet from the nearest speaker there was a 0.01 ish second delay and effectively a sustaining reverb.
Microphones generally use tiny bits of metal in electric or magnetic fields to detect vibration. When the high gain devices themselves are not solidly built to prevent vibration internally they actually add sound. That is called distortion.
Vacuum tubes are mechanical things. They have tiny coils of wire. They have little plates and are held together with tiny rods and wires. If they can move they will. If they move they will modulate the sound. If you have no input signal and shout at a high gain tube, sound can come out of your system. It is effectively a microphone. So is it likely that people who select vacuum tubes for the sound are actually selecting mechanically defective products? I think that is a yes.
When I found sound coming out of my system from touching a button that had a mechanical click, or tapping the case, I took the cover off the preamp and started substituting tubes, searching for the culprit(s). Eventually I started holding them up to my ear and flicking them with my finger. Some had strong ting sounds and even rang. Others just the sound of a glass tube. When I excluded the ringing ones my preamp returned to normal. Some Tesla tubes were still there.
So here we have tubes that I found were defective yet sounded good.
They were discounted and the vendor probably knew this. I liked the sound, but it was a distortion and not part of the original recording.
Elsewhere I have read where people prefer the sound of certain distortion. For a time you could buy devices that added reverb and synthetic acoustics to your stereo. They found buyers. If people buy what they like, and like a particular sound that is not a measure of accuracy.
A building or room with "good" acoustics has a sound of its own. A good concert hall is expected to add sound and good recordings capture that. It would be comparatively easy to build concert halls and recording venues to be close to anechoic. They would not add any sound, and be very dead and even unpleasant sounding. Room sound that is part of the recording is good when it is real. The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions were recorded in a church with excellent sound, and it is part of the performance. That is also one reason that recording is so popular, it is real.
Hearing that room sound on a recording is accurate. Adding pleasant sounds to it is not.
There are many suspect products that add pleasant sounds. Many tube power amps have audible even harmonic distortions and are liked because of that. Speakers that send sounds out the back and add space and air by bouncing it off walls are not being accurate, but pleasant. I also the same can be said for moving coil phono pickups.
I read a review of a moving magnet phono cartridge (that I later bought) by a golden ear who praised it as "being closest to the master tapes". Yet his personal system favorite was a far more expensive moving coil. People who actually use master tapes to cut LPs do not use moving coil cartridges to audit their work for apparently good reasons.
I think you can get a very accurate and honest sounding system for quite reasonable money if you know what to look for.
I am trying for accuracy.
