interesting article about turntables and vinyl

I regularly experience transcendental moments with my turntable-sourced rig. Moments where I feel in touch with the musicians and their artistic intentions when the recording was made. I occasionally have had these experiences with CDs, but nowhere near as often.

As for the article, I'm glad it gives widespread exposure to the vinyl renaissance, but:

... Most older turntables have a feature that allows users to replace the cartridge that controls record playback quality, a feature that might be important to audiophiles. Newer models are often outfitted with one standard cartridge that won't allow the sound quality to be adjusted.

WTF?

It's always interesting when non tech minded boneheads publish stuff like that...the Sunday NY Times magazine recently had a full page article about the ProCo Rat guitar "stomp box" distortion gizmo, one of which I've owned (and used daily) for over 30 years...the designer wanted to "capture the essence of stadium rock"...great stuff.

Wolf-and isn't capturing the essence of stadium rock a lofty goal?

Watching records play when I was a kid helped get me interested in electronics and technology.

There is something to be said for being able to watch your music play as well as listen.

Mapman.

I agree about the visual look of a record spinning on a turntable. Sure the fidelity is what we most want but the look and such of the record on turntable set up has a coolness to it.

Tape is sorta similar, Reel to Reel machines also look cool as tapes turn, even cassettes look cool in a deck.

Funny thing about CD's is that many of the first gen models had windows to be able to see the CD spinning. Not just top loaders like many Philips models but most first gens had doors that opened like a cassette deck tape door and one dropped the CD in it then closed it. It allowed one to see a CD spinning from the front face of the unit. Though I never had a front loading CD player as such, I did have a Philips CD-101 top loader and thought the window looked cool. Too bad none are made as windowed front loaders today.