"How much do you want to spend?" I asked cautiously. His answer: $500, tops.
The reviewer venturing to identify the birth bed of heavy metal music risks wrath. So be it.
The heavy metal genre has many roots. The idea of power chords and music centered on ominous, mythological, and vaguely threatening lyrics goes back centuries; consider the use of European church music in various eras to literally scare the hell out of believers. But heavy metal as we know it started 50 years ago with Black Sabbath's Paranoid.
Preview, from July 1968 (Vol.2 No.6): Overall sound extremely good, but phono sounds slightly lacking in deep bass, despite impeccable measurements. Scratch filter judged very highly effective, but tone controls felt to be less than ideal be cause of excessively coarse action and marked tendency to affect midrange output. Spring-return Tape Monitor switch probably will not appeal to serious tapesters. This preamp is slated for a full report in the next issue.
Attending the two-day Making Vinyl Berlin B2B conference on May 2 and 3, 2019 was an obvious decision for me, even if Day 1's "Physical Media World Conference" panel discussion was more about optical digital media than it was about analog vinyl.