2. analog
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The Mood Was Ruined

I recently bought an analog set up and a few lps.  I have always been militantly pro digital.  I’m trying not to accumulate lps and trying to limit purchases to interesting stuff that may not be available digitally.  I have my lps cleaned ultrasonically.  My tastes are generally confined to Classical Music.

  Today I was playing a Columbia lp  that had just been cleaned of Charles Rosen playing late Beethoven Piano Sonatas.  Specifically I was listening to Beethoven’s last Sonata, Op.111.  The second and final movement has very long trills, great arcing trills that tend to dissolve into arpeggiated chords in the highest octaves and played at various shadings of the pppp range.  A great performance and recording can make you afraid to breathe because you don’t want to break the spell, and Rosen ( a noted scholar and author of the Classical period besides being a great musician ) had me transported there.

  And then it happened.  With perhaps a minute to go, as I was in rapture, a loud POP! and then the music stopped.  Apparently my turntable, a Technics direct drive, when it can’t track a divot in a groove, stops playing and the tone arm lifts up.  I grabbed a magnifying glass and there is a visible interruption of the vinyl surface.

  It was every thing that I have ever hated about vinyl crystallized in a moment.  
  This record was as presumably clean as it will ever get.  I just picked it up from the business that cleans it, and provided a new MoFi inner sleeve as part of the service .  I am not blaming the service.  I had never played the lp before getting it cleaned, but the other lps that I had cleaned the same day came back in great shape.

  I will never probably play this lp again.  It was like having great sex and then having the husband knock on the bedroom door with the stock of his shotgun.

  I am now listening to a CD of Jonathan Biss playing Op.111, but the magic of the moment is gone
  

mahler123

Showing 2 responses by mahler123

mahler123 OP
3,063 posts
 

Thanks for the comments, a few replies.  First of all, why would I need to detail the rest of the system?  This issue is clearly related to the vinyl and the turntable (I am using turntable as shorthand for table/arm/cart/).  For the record it is a Technics 1500 Direct Drive with an Ortofon 2 M Blue cartridge.  At the moment it resides in a second system .  The Phono PreAmp is Cambridge Audio, athe speakers are Silverline Panatella floorstanders, and the amplification is the dreaded Anthem 5.1

AVR playing in 2 channel for analog.  I can hear the sneering on the other end, but the analog front end cost about $2K, and I choose to put it in a secondary system for now because I am trying to reconfigure my rack in the main system.  (I had started to wall mount a dedicated shelf for the turntable, discovered the studs aren’t in the right place, and trying to figure out the next move).  
  My issue isn’t the sound of the system.  As another poster noted Piano sound is the hardest to get right, and this Direct Drive is the best non digital source for Piano that I have ever heard.  And the rest of the current rig doesn’t pertain to the original post

mahler123 OP
3,063 posts
 

@ghdprentice I appreciate the attempt to be helpful, but I really think that the issue of how a tone arm and cartridge navigate an lp has nothing to do with phono preamp, etc.  I wasn’t complaining about the quality of the sound; in fact I was intensely enjoying it when it was so rudely interrupted

.  I had intended the turntable to be in my main 2 channel system, but I might just leave it where it is.  I am really impressed with how it resolved the differences between the two hands.  I could clearly hear the gentle growl of the bass clef and every subtle pedal effect with the many grades of pppp that Beethoven asks for.  The caveat is that I have never heard a digital version of this recording.  Instead of trying to collect multiple copies of a hard to obtain decades old lp, all of which may contain flaws (Columbia pressings of this period were decidedly not known for pristine vinyl and quality control, and this was probably a budget collection 3 lp set at the time) I will try to get a digital copy if for no other reason to be able to compare.

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