What is the “World’s Best Cartridge”?

@rauliruegas , no argument from me. Only in countries where people have large amounts of expendable income is the LP going to persist.

@atmasphere , modern 64 bit floating point processors can lose a bunch of bits before distortion becomes any issue close to being audible. This is more important than just volume controls. In order to do "room control" effectively you have to be able to cut digital volume as well as boost it at various frequencies. This has to be done without adding distortion on one hand and overloading amplifiers and speakers on the other. The technology is now fully up to the task. The new DEQX Premate series should be amazing on all accounts judging from what I have read. 

I have never heard a silent LP, quiet ones yes, silent no. Also, LPs are not reliably quiet. Some are throw away noisy from the very start. Dust? Contaminated PVC? Recycled PVC? Bad handling? It is a very fragile process. As long as you have a backup disc digital files are 100% reliable in terms of playability and noise levels. You can not get a file with a scratch on it. This says nothing about the music.

Records may be improving overall but there is such wide variation in quality it is hard to see or hear. Some of my European Classical albums from the 70s and 80's are fabulously quiet and are great recordings. I can not imaging new releases being any better.

@r_f_sayles "our ears and tastes are too varied."

That is a lame excuse. More accurate is always better. If I play a hi fidelity recording of an oncoming train on a table radio you will not jump out of the way. You will know instantly that it is a recording of a train played on a rather low fi device. If I put a hi fidelity recording on a state of the art system and waltz you into the room blindfolded you will wind up cowering in a corner when the train passes by. There is accurate and there is everything else. When dealing with a group of highly accurate systems capable of real output at 18 Hz, issues of taste may arise but, as Aryton Senna da Silva said, "second is just the first of the losers." When dealing with less than stellar systems taste becomes more of an issue relative to what defects you can live with. Hiding behind cable elevators and fancy cables will not help

It is chasing accuracy that makes this difficult and therefore entertaining. Viva the difficulty.

mijostyn Try to lighten up just a bit and enjoy the illusion, ah? 
 

My point was merely to enjoy listening and enjoy what you have. No excuses there. 
 

I have never heard a HiFi that sounds lifelike. Only brief glimpses of light and occasional unveilings

Dear @mijostyn  :  " my own purchases it is about 50/50 LPs to digital files. "

That 50% on LP means that all those LPs were/are ndew/inedit recordings and with no re-issues? and that 50%  of LPs how many bougth you by month?

Totally new LPs have several problems to appears in the market. Even that exist over 100+ pressing plants in the world many of these are small labels that over the time were and will disappears leaving only the around 10 " big " pressings plants that can't fulfill the artist/audiophiles needs of new material on LP. Pressing plants is a business and for the consumer prices does not goes to high the plants needs to presses 10K+ samplers of each new LP title. In the last 10 years the LP prices gones higher and higher and this tendency is far away to dissapears but the other way around: will be higher alaways.

Other problem is that vinyl is not a friendly build material ( petroleum. ) with the erath enviroment and will disappears sooner or latter. From some years now some small or maybe not so small plants are trying that the sources of that vinyl change it for other new material friendly with the enviroment and as a fact there are a few options that could or could not help about because those new materials needs to pass the " test time " of playing.

So, in a few years your 50% will goes to maybe 5% or just zero. So enjoy what you have.

R.

@solypsa

Well, I have spent most of my career in IT. My first PC did not have a hard drive. I have been in charge of large data centers and implemented and been responsible for running multibillion dollar global corporations’ systems.

Digitally an album takes up 16 megabytes + or - 100%. This means you could store around 5,000 albums on one 4 tb disk drive. The environmental impact of producing 5,000 albums is huge… for one person! The environmental impact of producing one drive and servicing hundreds of thousands of people or more is minuscule. There are literally orders of magnitude differences between the two in terms of energy and environmental impact.