Michael Fremer’s video made at AXPONA 2019 includes this exchange between he and an attendee at the Mag Lev Audio (makers of a magnetically-isolated turntable) booth: Attendee: "It (the table) avoids the vibrations. But ya know some people say records sound warmer because it gets the sound from the speakers to the stylus." Fremer: "No. Those people are idiots."
The size of the LP groove is extremely small, it’s modulations even smaller. The stylus measures the modulations in the groove, transducing those measurements into an electronic signal. The measurement is microscopic, the signal very low in voltage. Both are very susceptible to corruption from outside forces, mechanical and electronic. Any unrelated vibration affecting either can result in a change in the signal---either a loss of information, or an addition of artificial information; that’s called distortion. One may find the distorted sound "pleasing", or "musical", but it’s short of the highest level of music reproduction quality.
And what’s with this obsession with soundstaging?! Recordings made in studios (the majority in most peoples music libraries) contain phony, artificial, fabricated, illusionary imaging. I’m much more concerned with 1- the sound of the instruments and voices themselves---their timbre, tonality, color, texture, weight, body, and 3-dimensional palpability; and 2- the effect of the playback system on the timing of the players and singers, and the subtle interplay between them all---the inherent, essential temporal nature of music. Both of those effect the emotional content of the music and lyrics, and even it’s quality as music. Soundstaging is a parlor trick, devoid of musical meaning.
