Analog Corner

With its swept-wing shape and platter-forward design, Sperling-Audio's L-1 turntable ($35,950, without tonearm) stands out in a crowd. This high-mass design from Germany is the result of a collaboration between Ansgar Sperling and Michael Bönninghoff, two fiftysomething engineers who began working together in recording studio construction.

Both also bring to the L-1's design and construction years of experience in signal processing. For years, Bönninghoff was the chief developer at Brauner microphones, and today is the technical director of the German pro-audio company S.E.A. Sperling worked in radio and signal processing, and has a strong interest in tubed electronics.

Add to the deniers of the Holocaust and Climate Change those who say that the vinyl resurgence isn't happening.

Seriously, the pushback was bound to happen, and the bigger this so-called "hipster fad" gets, the more the scoffers sweat. In 2014, according to my sources—representatives of the world's largest pressing plants—more than 73,985,000 LPs were pressed. That's correct: almost 74 million LPs. Taking into consideration such things as multi-LP boxed sets like The Beatles in Mono (which might be counted as a single record in terms of sales), defective discs rejected by consumers or retailers, and unsold records, of which there surely are many in the pipeline, we could cut the number in half—and still have around 35 million. That's more than a 40% increase worldwide over 2013.

My skeptical visitor, to whom I'd just pointed out some of the acoustic treatments and other accessories in my listening room, wasn't trying to push my buttons. He just wanted my opinion.

"No," I said. "Some things make the sound worse—way worse—but after all these years, I'm convinced that just about everything that can be done to a room or a system produces an audible difference, for better or worse."

To me, that headline screamed "Audio!" And the book that needs to be written is The Digital Recording Revolution: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Audio's Computer Age.