CD vs. SACD vs. DVD-Audio vs Vinyl vs...

Hi Carl, I'm lucky enough to have a few friends with second homes and get invited frequently to Upstate NY, The Berkshires near Tanglewood and Fla. I go to London about once every 5 years to see family. I must admit for many, many years I couldn't be dragged off the island of Manhattan, but my fiance` is slowly curing my wicked ways. At 18 I signed with Mercury records to do a few Rock and Roll albums. My first demo was done at Bell Sound studios before it was closed. That is where Buddy Holly did his recording here. I was managed by some of the same people that managed Jimi Hendrix and my second studio experience was in Electric Lady studios in Studio B using Jimis' actual amplifiers (talk about if these walls could talk). I did my first album at Plaza Sound. It is on the top floor of Radio City Music Hall. The Rocketts dressing room was down the corridor.WOW! I drifted into jingle writing and producing for 10 years after that.The spots I worked on won a Cleo and other awards. I had to become adept at different styles of music and my tastes were growing. I once had to conduct multiple tracks of a string section made up of the finest players from the major NY orchestras. I struggled to keep up with them but everything went well. I discontinued producing and began teaching music privately due to poor health. I have been operating at a slower pace for a while now but hope to get up to normal speed again soon. The equipment you mentioned was exactly the type of equipment I used in many sessions. I used to like the older Harrison soundboards a lot. Usually I let the engineers set up a few different mikes for a session and picked the one that sounded best in that particular room. Sometimes I combined mikes. I had my own small recording studio for the lower budget commercials. I chose the Neumann mikes most of the time. I enjoyed growing in experience as a producer but I couldn't continue to sing about potato chips forever, even if the money was good. I have heard and appreciate some audiophile type recordings but I was of the mind that if a $90 mike got it better than a $4000 mike in the given situation I chose interesting sound first. BTW I was at Sound by Singer recently and the head of DCS was there with the president of Straight Wire. He told me that it many ways the design of the Sony SACD players was based on the Elgar Ring technology. He said that the cost to develope the Elgar would have been too high for any other company but that the Elgar was based on the work of the scientists who developed the British intelligence national security system. They started developing the DCS system as an offshoot of their intelligence work. Talk about a NY minute! I hope this bit of background info helps to introduce me to all of the regular participants here. I am happy to be in the same "room" with so many experienced and fun people. Here's hoping to find you all happy and well. Bye for now.

In most studios there are Lexicon Reverbs and Yamaha reverbs,( some even had a plate in the ground or a feed to the hallways). When I bought the Yamaha DSPA-1 (recently sold) I recognized some of the DSPs' as the reverb settings from their $10,000 reverb units! Now you can buy a DSP-A1 fot $1200 and get better sound fields than many studios have. In the same way, I hope the expensive SACD format will become the everyday format in the near future. *Carl, I will try to listen to one of the high end turntables at Singer Sound in the next few weeks if it can be arranged. I saw one in their biggest room that cost $20,000.In that same room I listened to the JMLab Utopias $70,000, with two enormous Krell amps, $120,000 each and although it was impressive in some ways it did not move me at all. The two other people listening with me agreed that they were a bit dull! Can you imagine, over $300,000 worth of gear and it sounded boring. We stepped into the next room and put on Ricki Lee Jones' "Horses" album (DDD,..digital all the way) using almost the same system as described in the earlier post,(DCS, Delios, Purcell,Avalons, Conrad Johnson etc. This was expensive gear but it didn't require a mortgage just a big loan and it blew the doors off of that other system. I guess it takes some serious money to get up to the highest end but it is a lot of fun to try to get as close as possible to that benchmark on a budget, by choosing the right combination of equipment. I wish that I was nearby some of you and could participate in a listening session or two.* Vinyl guys, with the higher end systems you have does record wear present significant problems?

The only wear I've dealt with is that done by bad and unclean styli and setup thru the years (of other people), on vintage LP's. Some say they can be brought back to good condition, but that's more hope than reality. Just a thought, but you should seek out Michael Fremer if you want to know about vinyl. He currently is the vinyl guy for Stereophile magazine. I think he lives in NYC. Read every "Analog Corner" and review he's done there over the past 5 years (before you try to meet him), and you'll know plenty. Sorry to hear about your poor health. Hope you feel better soon. BTW, I think YOU should get the prize for the longest backstory of something...heh heh. Kidding only.

Carl, How many times can you play an LP before it shows signs of wear under the best circumstances? I remember them losing some of the higher frequencies after a few plays on a fairly decent rig.

That's a very tough call, and would vary with the vinyl formulation. Maybe 10 or 15 times with a good hard vinyl surface, maybe 3 to 8 times with a soft one. It's almost imperceptable, so maybe the treble range above 15kHz loses about .2 dB with every 10 to 20 plays (past the first 10). IT VARIES MORE THAN THAT GOING FROM OUTER TO INNER GROOVE, USUALLY, from the surface velocity decrease. With the best tracking cartridges, this particular effect might be below audibility. And sometimes, it was compenstated for during that particular LP's manfacturing process. But there are far bigger transgressions than this, like faulty RIAA curve settings for the cutting amplifier. I use Gruv Glide every time I play a side usually, along with this five step process (others will disagree, and they're wrong...heh heh, kidding...sort of): Clean the stylus with the Benz brush; An older bottle of Last #4 on the stylus; then a newer one; then Record Research Lab #9; then Last #5. I try to let it dry for 30 seconds or more between each application. I do this for every record side played. If the cantilever suspension turns grey (dried out) after a year or two, I apply Armor All with the end of a toothpick, directly onto the rubber (carefully!). You have to do it upside down, so take the arm off first, or else take the cartridge off. Works great.