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In 1975, I spent $45 bucks on a phono cartridge for my entry-level Thorens turntable. It was an Audio-Technica AT-something. It was purple, and it had a Shibata stylus profile, which impressed me. Using the financial model described above, something of similar quality should cost in the neighborhood of $117 today. But notwithstanding my Lollardy views, there aren't any $117 phono cartridges out there that would satisfy me. I've come to think of almost any phono cartridge that sells for less than $1000 as "affordable"—this from the owner of a rusty Saab with a Greenpeace sticker. God help me…
The title of this month's column is the legend Sheffield Labs emblazoned on a T-shirt a couple of years ago, to promote their jaundiced view of digital audio. Since then, even Sheffield's reactionary perfectionists softpedalled their anti-digital crusade, perhaps because of the number of CDs they've been selling! Their personnel no longer wear those T-shirts at CES, which is unfortunate. Although most people in the audio field no longer see digital audio as madness, digital denouncing is still very much with us.
I refer to the recently-announced discovery, by a Professor Judith Reilly,…
This is quite a hypothesis, and certainly one that will gladden the heart of every digiphobe! But even assuming that Prof. Reilly's measurements and measuring techniques are beyond reproach, she is going to have a very hard time selling her hypothesis to the rest of the scientific community: on the face of it, the relationship she proposes is absurd.
Basically, what she asks us to believe is that "ultrasonic spikes" from digitally mastered records somehow reach the turntable's hardened steel bearing at sufficient intensity to crack them. Personally, I do not believe it.
Before I…
The only cyclical information above 25kHz that's part of any vinyl recording of music is the continuous 40kHz tone that carries the difference information on RCA's CD-4 quadrophonic recordings. By the time this 40-kHz carrier is run through RIAA equalization, it is no more powerful than the rest of the musical signal (footnote 4).
But let's grant her the benefit of the doubt for a moment and pretend that all digitally mastered source material does contain the pulses she sees as the source of digital damage. Let's follow the level of those pulses through a topnotch audio system.
…
Larry Archibald comments:
This editorial frankly worries me. On the one hand, I fear that the mere mention of rampant (potential) problems in the turntable world will impel thousands more to hasty purchase of a CD player—a technology which I consider immature. On the other hand, aspersions seem to be cast here at work which is sincerely done, and for which we have no hard evidence to the contrary.
The publication of Prof. Reilly's work as an AES preprint, however, invites critical examination. In my discussions with Prof. Reilly and her colleague Neil Levenson, much reference was…
Professor Reilly responded—with spirit!—in January 1986 (Vol.9 No.1):
Dear Mr. Holt:
Enclosed is my rebuttal to J. Gordon Holt's "Stop Digital Madness" ("As We See It," Vol.8 No.8). In spite of being tremendously upset and angered by the manner in which my work was reported, by the errors contained therein, and by the shoddy reproduction of the graphs, I have kept my rebuttal at an unemotional, professional level.
To place an antidigital label upon me is entirely without foundation. In trying to restore my music system to listenable quality, after going through a large…
In what was at first a dubious reaction to my hypothesis, experts at two large companies regularly working in these fields subsequently found such microcracks. (See Levenson's column in Fanfare, November/December 1985, for micrographs of these microcracks.) In a sampling of about 50 shafts and bearings, we have consistently found that 'tables with a history of playing digital records for more than a few hours have these microcracks. Unused 'tables, or used ones which have played only analog records, show no microcracks. We are currently increasing the sample.
To account for the observed…
JGH Responds
Anyone who extracts from a manufacturer, as a condition for returning a preamp for repair, a promise that no digitized music be played in the room with it, and then denies being antidigital, is trying to kid somebody.
Despite the prolixity of Prof. Reilly's response to my editorial, she has still made no attempt to address the questions I see as crucial to this whole affair. These questions are:
1. Who were the "others" whose "independent tests confirmed" that ultrasonic information accompanies digitized music? Names and publication attributions, please.…
LA Appends
While I had some fears about publishing the Reilly material, and JGH's attack on it, my fears have been laid to rest. Stereophile Vol.8 No.8 was distributed at the 1986 Winter CES, and it turns out that many industry people had already heard of Judith Reilly's research. We received no lukewarm responses to JGH's article: a large number of people were actively offended by Prof. Reilly's findings, and a small number adamantly defended her.
A phone call was received just before deadline from a perturbed Tony Gregory of Audiophile Systems, the U.S. Linn distributor. I had…
On mornings when I can get up early enough after a late-night listening session, I take the last express bus from my Brooklyn suburb to Stereophile's Manhattan office. An inveterate people watcher, I notice that while my fellow travelers and I don't form a traditional queue at the bus stop, preferring instead to mill around in something that resembles a jelly donut, we still enter the bus in the order in which we arrived at the stop. The balance between individualism and social necessity is thus preserved.
At the other end of the line that separates social sophistication from mob…