Raul, I'm an engineer and it is easy to get overwhelmed when considering all of the design issues and technical hurdles involved with music reproduction and begin to think that making any music at all is near impossible. Step back a moment and consider sound reproduction as an art more than an engineering problem. How? Well, the music begins and ends with coils. Transformers is a good name for them because they transform the live music into electrical signals and then back into live music. The process starts with the coils in the microphones and transducers and goes to the coils in the cutting stylus. The vinyl disc is simply a mechanical record of the signals generated by the coils. (The master tapes are a record of the signals from the tape head coils). The phono cartridge coils reproduce these signals from the cutting stylus coils and then goes through the coils in the preamp/amp and finally to the speaker coils. In the whole sound reproduction chain nothing is more important than these coils. Some are mass produced on automated equipment and some are wound by the hands of master craftsman. Many people will tell you that some of the most esoteric gear rely on the art of the master craftsmen winding these coils- large or small. I'm not a EE but I believe the basic audio circuits have been around for decades. The application of new components such as wiring, capacitors, resistors, isolation, etc. make for the modern improvements in audio amplifiers. Circuitry is not nearly as interesting as the design and construction of the coils of wire in the stereo chain. I believe, Raul that it goes back to the basics- the theme that I see oft in your posts- purity of signal through top notch subcomponents, isolation and dampening and a rock solid time base; ie. stable platter speed. Just offering a different perspective here.
