sacd,vinyl, and rebook....

Eldartford, your LP rig might be limited but mine is not. Perhaps it's not prudent for everyone to buy a Walker or Rockport, but for those of us that want the ultimate and have an existing library of analog music, it is well worth the investment.

Albert,

Please know I my comments were not a veiled attack on your contribution. Instead, I found it an interesting articulation - in absolute terms - of how small the objective difference is, that leads one to say a $25k turntable would "crush" a $15k digital rig.

The non-linearity of that observation is staggering!

The ironic thing is I have no doubt I would come to the same conclusion if I listened to each source on your rig (which is amazing, btw). But then I would ask: does this $10k difference truly get in the way of my experiencing the inspirational meaning of the music? In other words: what are we listening to - music or engineering (format)?

Best,

If someone starts pressing HQ LPs from the analog mater reels of 1968>1974 Grateful Dead concerts, I'll go analog.

nothing short of that effort will do.
(~);}

sometimes your taste in music (or lack of) locks in into a certain media type, as in my case. Its all digital or nothing.

Mprime, your comments are completely understandable, particularly for a music lover like myself.

If I were as young as my son, beginning my first year of college, I might not pursue analog at all. His software is primarily CD and MP3 (Apple iPod) and almost no analog, particularly compared to what I own.

For me, much of the classical, jazz, pop and rock and roll released over the past 50 years, is (or was) available on Vinyl.

For example, I just did a search at EBAY and there are 160309 vinyl records for sale today. Assuming duplicates and excluding a majority of the titles over content, a 2% hit rate would provide you with a library of more than 3000 records.

Those like myself with a large collection, replacing these titles with Redbook or SACD makes little sense. Of course that is exactly what Sony wishes we would do, all the while telling us we are missing the boat by not falling in line with the newest format.

Andrew Litton who is a Grammy Award winner for his classical releases and also conductor for the Dallas Symphony is part of my music group. It would amaze you guys to listen to one of his master digital tapes on our system and then compare it to the publicly released Redbook CD or DVD. You would be horrified, I promise you.

By the way, he is the only member of my group who owns MORE vinyl software than me. He had to build a separate room to house the collection.

There are about fifteen members that attend our weekly (my home) and monthly (bottle head members home) and most are like me, dual format. I have had some very expensive digital gear in my system over the last few years and none of it competes with analog.

I guess since I have not heard the EMM directly in my system I cannot say how well it would do. I did hear a demo with Steve Hoffman (Denver AudioFest) where we listened to analog tape on a Stellvox and compared to Redbook. Again, you would be horrified at how miserable the CD was in comparison. Any of you that know Dan at EAR USA can ask him, we were sitting beside each other.

Anyway, music IS what it's all about and I respect everyone having passion and commitment to their personal favorite. I have developed a rather strong bias through testing and am still waiting for the "next" digital player to come along that will convince me to step up to the bar and lay down the cash.

Albertporter...My point (which you didn't get) is that real world problems of LPs, clicks, pops, warps, dirt on the stylus and groove damage aflict even the most modest system. You don't have to spend much before these medium-related problems limit sonic quality. Even a super high end system like yours cannot overcome these problems, although it might sound good with pristine LPs. On your system, a scratch on the LP will be reproduced with stunning fidelity! Various electronic devices were developed to cope with these problems, but I am sure that a purist like you would not use them.

By the way, did you ever experience DBX encoded LPs? Now that was really superb vinyl technology. It was just as quiet as digital, which is what most people liked, but also phono pickup performance (distortion etc) was greatly improved by avoiding extreme groove modulation. Too bad it died.