"Trevor Wilson" wrote

**Perhaps our experience differs. Whilst the results of such a waveform
are not perfect, they are considerably superior to Red Book CD. I've even
run such tests on high performance (double speed) Compact Cassette
machines and the square wave response is surprisingly good. Of course,
such machines can easily manage -3dB @ 30kHz.

"easily"? at 9.5cm/sec? I don't think so!

If a double-speed CC has been lined up to be -3dB at 30kHz than it has been
wrongly lined up. 30kHz is quite unnecessary for audio, and in the case of
analogue tape can only be obtained at the expense of poorer *audio*
performance.

In any
case we are talking about expensive studio machines here, the
relevant comparison would be to 96 and 192kHz sampled audio, which
clearly has a far greater bandwidth.

**Strawman noted.

Hardly a "strawaman". You were comparing a digital format unfavorabley to
some analogue formats. I was merely pointing out that higher sampling rate
digital systems easily beat the analogue ones you are praising.


ontact area of even the
smallest stylus?

**This one seems to do the trick:

http://www.dynavector.com/etechnical/microstylus.html

And how much does one of those cost?

The cartridge has an upper frequency limit of 100kHz.

To what point? Who needs 100kHz in an audio system?
I have some 10kHz square wave CRO photos somewhere around the place. I'll
post them in a week or two. I've examined this stylus under a binocular
microscope. I was more than a little suprised to see pretty much what the
photos show. The stylus is a beautiful thing.


It may be "beautiful", but it's pointless (and no doubt very expensive). How
long does it last?

I question the ability of even that sort of thing to consistently deliver
100kHz. One of the reasons the CD4 'quadraphonic' system failed was the
inabilty of vinyl technology to reliably deliver the subcarrier to the
decoder.

David.