"David Looser" wrote in
message

My claim "Modern turntables work no better than those of
the 1970s" is based on the fact that modern turntables
work no differently from those of the 1970s.

I suspect that some of them work more poorly than the best turntables of the
1970s, what with all of the high end floobydust that many of them affect.

The TT is far from high-tech, on the contrary it's a very simple
machine whose requirements has been well understood for
over half a century.

If memory serves, the last tech papers about advancements in production and
playback of LPs date back to the early 1970s, if not earlier.

If you are claiming that mechanical
engineering has improved dramatically in recent years I
suggest you look at some of the machines the Victorians
built.

There have been some advancements in materials and vibration control, but
there is no evidence that they had any benefits other than lowering costs.
It is certain that the cost of producing a given quality turntable has
increased much faster than inflation due to vastly reduced production
quantities and lack of competition.

In view of the well-known performance limitations
of the vinyl medium even you must accept that there must
be a point of perfection in TTs beyond which no audible
improvement will be apparent. I suggest this point was
reached by 1980 at the latest.

Probably at least 5 years before that. When serious efforts were made
towards optical discs and digital audio and some sucess was achieved,
serious efforts to improve the performance of vinyl lost their economic
justification. The Laserdisc was introduced in 1978 but its coming was
telegraphed well in advance of then. It was not clear in the early 1970s
whether the sequel technology would involve digital, but it was clear that
it would not involve conventional LP discs. Some candidate technologies
were based on FM coding.

So if you want to claim that modern TTs sound better than
those of 40 years ago I suggest that some evidence would
help your cause. I don't mean personal anecdotes, but a
properly conducted listening test.

There have been recently published technical tests of high end turntables
and they show zero advancement in technical performance.

[BTW a properly conducted listening test includes the
following requirements: listening panel of at least a
dozen, preferably more. Listeners to know nothing about
the test in advance (i.e.. they don't know they are
listening to turntables, let alone which ones), Each
listener listens on their own to avoid influencing each
other, order of presentation to vary with each listener
to avoid precedence effects and inclusion of 'trick'
comparisons (e.g., both A and B are the same TT) to see
how much listeners are subconsciously trying to provide
the answers they think are expected.]

I look forward to seeing the results of your test in due
course Iain.

We can count on Iain to again be a no-show.