Record wear

Despite being on record as saying "wear isn't an audible factor in my experience", Photon46 is not a cult member as he simply makes too much sense. I think it boils down to what type of music is being reproduced. Anything that has a lot of quiet moments or soft music will, in my experience, dissapoint, if not initially, then after a few plays.

On some music, there is magic in LP listening.

Not for everybody and, more to the point, not for every type of music.

Bigamp, looked at your system and with the amount of money you spent on it am left wondering why you think that new vinyl is pricey and why you have decided to be thrifty when it comes to an analogue setup. Then again, maybe your idea of inexpensive does not match mine. If you want a simple solution I would say get yourself a used Rega P9/1000 and a good cart properly set up and a decent phono section and you might want to live with these a while.

Pbb, you are quite right about the type of music, wear, noise, etc. I should have been more specific about that factor. I've got several hundred classical lps and many more rock and jazz. There is an increase in noise after repeated plays in many, but not every case. I've got some 80's German ECM releases that have many quiet passages and for some reason, they seem resistant to increasing noise. That's not the case with most of my classical recording though, there usually is a small incremental increase in the noise floor. It's honestly hard for me to say how much that noise floor increases as time passes though. With thousands of recording to listen to, I don't think even favorites get played that many times in a given year. I tend to prefer listening to vinyl rock and jazz recordings, as the inherently poorer signal to noise ratio of vinyl is masked by higher music db levels.

I though about this wear factor a little bit driving in to work. Record wear can be of both a subtractive and additive manner perhaps. As in wearing away vinyl when a cartridge is misaligned or otherwise doing damage. Noise is noticed when records are scratched or miscroscopic debris is welded to the vinyl during play, so that's additive. When I say that I don't hear audible wear, I mean that frequency response, soundstaging, etc. sounds the same, nothings been audibly lost. However, the noise floor can increase if things aren't cleaned to perfection.