I have always believed that the open reel format is superior to any form of recording on any media, provided, ofcourse, you have all the right settings and the proper recordings on the right tape to play with. Live performances were captured on these machines and continue to remain in the studio libraries as sources for subsequent mixdowns and transcirptions into whatever format, analog or digital. Then came the digital recording, also on open reel machines.
I would tend to agree with some audiophiles that analog has an inherent quality that SHOULD make them superior to digital. And between a turntable and an open reel, if i were to agree that analog were a wee bit superior to digital, it would have to be because of the open reel. Not turntables.
LPs played on turntables do present a lot of compromises that can render its sonics less than what it can deliver. But played on some of the most sophisticated playback equipment that makes no compromises on material and other aspects of playback, audipohile grade and clean LPs can sound gorgeous over CDs.
But the LP analog equipment and the media are fraught with so much imperfections as to render average home playback a real hit and miss affair that can be overcome only by much ceremonious clutter.
Digital recording is not perfect to begin with, but it freed me from the tedium of anolgue maintenance. It's seems to me it's a lot easier to get the best sound possible with even modest gear than with any analogue set-up which require nothing less than the very expensive and exotic set to achieve excellent sonics.
As a consumer, so much turntable choices often left me wondering if I got the right one: direct drive or belt-drive, straight or s-shaped or trangential tone arm, cantilever geometry and construction, gimbal mounted, uni-pivot mounted or bearing mounted, etc. Not so with digital. I mean i really couldn't care less if they use single beam or three beam lasers or blue or red or whatever.
And those jitter bugs often complained of as inherent in most digital gears are nothing compared to the inherent motor/platter rumble noise, preamp RIAA equalization non-linearites, cartridge overhang errors, tangential tracking errors, tracking errors due to incorrectly set tonearm tracking force, anti-skate errors, cartridge-tonearm mismatch errors, vertical tracking errors, cartridge needle resonances, wow & flutter, microphonic modulations, intergroove modulations (like hearing the next loud passage or next grove even before getting to it), inter-channel cross-talk and sonic degration as you go into the inner groove, etc, etc... Not to mention errors borne from the LPs themselves like LP surface noise (compounded by the use of recycled LPs in the mid 70s to conserve petrol) unwanted resonnances in the LP and tracking erros due to LP warpage. It seemed to me on hindsight that getting the best sound out of any turntable is often left to the consumer, the manufacturer does the 1st 50%, the rest depends on how good a tweak goes into. Add to this the fact that in some materials with excessive bass, the recording engineers had to cut back on the intensity of such passages to allow the cutting lathe to make a proper groove. No such limitations with digital. And yes, while i find some of my first CDs seemingly strident and harsh (more the fault of recording engineers), and seemed to lack the airiness I found in LPs, the newer 20-25-bit remixes and reissues, done by seasoned engineers who know how to makes CDs the right way, have come out with really gorgeous digital transciptions.
There was a time in the early 90s when the compulsion to resurrect my LP passion was germinating. As I couldn't find some of my LP titles in CD. I was in fact about to get either an old Technics or Numarch turntables discarded by a studio. Good thing somebody else beat me to them. Now with DVD-A and SACD, it's a sure bet I would never go back to LPs. My upgrade path to these media are quite clear and, depending on which format wins, quite inescapable. I wouldn't claim that digital is superior to analog. But I can sympathize with people who feel the otherway around. I have grown old in this hobby to recognize there are good recordings and well made transciptions on either media as well as bad ones. But in digital, getting good sounds just need not be so ceremoniously tediuous.
