is the sound of vinyl due to the physical process of the turntable?

sometimes the first step in responding is to try to make sure we understand the question.

the ’sound’ comes from a stylus being dragged through a groove of undulations that cause the stylus to deflect and move a coil or magnet to send a signal. the tiny signal then gets amplified and we hear music from a speaker. although there are even more crude methods of using a megaphone to amplify the signal from the stylus.

the media the groove is on can be a round metal cylinder, a piece of vinyl, or a cardboard cereal box. anything you can cut the groove in and will imprint the undulations then be rotated could work. then something has to rotate the media for the stylus to read it and send the signal.

a turntable is what is now used to rotate media, and it’s the choice that has become a mature process. but fundamentally if all you want is sound of some sort the components of the process are not locked into what we view as present day turntables.

OTOH we did not get here by accident. it was 143 years of messing around.

what was the question again?

@mikelavigne ,
I don't own a single LP and really not interested. But that was THE BEST explanation you provided on how turntables work and how the sound is produced using the coil. Thanks much 🙏

Personally I think the answer is “no”. We hear in analog and by playing vinyl the music remains in the analog domain, by converting to a digital storage, we abandon the analog domain. Then by trying to reproduce that digital stored format back to analog so our ears can understand it, something gets lost. We have been trying for years and have come close with expensive DAC’s, but it is never exact, acceptable yes, but not exact.

My theory anyway.

sam here is it possible to make a dummy record like the nothing record (1978) that was cut with no music just the blank grooves and play that while i run digital audio somehow through the stylus cartridge