In the digital realm, multiples of DSD challenge ever higher-resolution PCM files, it’s USB versus SPDIF, local storage versus cloud-based audio — the variants of digital technology go on and on, the decisions and debates themselves upsampled into an arena where the goalposts seem in ever active motion.
One relative constant remains. We’re approaching one-and-a-half centuries using the gramophone, the ‘phonograph’, with its crippling mechanical and inherent vibrational challenges, yet the turntable still holds so much… music. Perhaps not despite but because of the physical aspects and apparent limitations, and their interrelation as a music-playing system, the modern turntable can be tonally, spatially and dynamically accurate. Despite dissenting futurists, even if the digital universe’s pure mathematics may seem, on paper, to be superior to the mechanisms driving the needle and…
