[Audio Empire]

I can hear the howls of derision now from certain parties who post here
regularly. I'm out of my mind. There can just be no other explanation for it!

OK. Tonight I go to an audio acquaintance's home to try to solve a puzzle.
This guy has a damn good system. His speakers are fairly new Wilson Sasha's.
His amps are Nelson Pass XS-150 monoblocks and his pre-amp is an Classe
CP-700. His front end is a Marantz SA-11S2 SACD/CD player. Recently he
bought a Weiss dac202U digital to analog converter connected via Firewire to
a MacBook Pro running Amarra.

Several moths ago, his father-in-law passed away leaving him a considerable
classical record collection. Our friend had no record player but his Classe
preamp did come with a phono preamp option. Not really being all that
interested in records, but being nonetheless curious about the record
collection he'd inherited, he purchased a Music Hall MMF5.1 turntable
ensemble for around $900 complete with arm and "Music Hall" branded MM
cartridge (which I suspect is really a British Goldring).

The dilemma is this. Right along, Our Friend has been purchasing
High-Resolution downloads of things that interested him from HDTracks.
Recently he bought the Antal Dorati/London Symphony 24/176.4 download of The
music of Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov. Using his Mac and Amarra to stream the
recording to his Weiss DAC, he was very impressed with the purchase until he
found that his father-in-law had a copy of the original issue from 1961 on
Mercury Living Presence LP. Just for the hell of it, he decided to give the
LP a spin on his $1000 turntable rig. Expecting to laugh it off the
turntable, he was startled to find that the LP sounded better than the HD
download through his $7000 DAC!. That's when he called me. Turns out that I
have both the mid-'90's CD transferred by Wilma Fine, the record's original
producer as well as the later remastered SACD of the same title. I suggested
that I bring them over as well as some equipment. I showed up over there this
evening with both silver-disc versions of the Mercury disc as well as my test
SACD/CD, a Shure test record, a copy of the BMC SACD of "The Reiner Sound"
and a Classic Records 33.3 RPM reissue of same, and a HP400D RMS voltmeter.
The first thing I did was make as sure that we used the controlled outputs of
the SACD section of the Marantz player, the volume controlled outputs of the
Weiss, for both the CD and the Firewire feed from the Mac to insure that the
record, the SACD, the CD and the HD feed were all level matched exactly (at
least to the test signals).

I told my host, that most likely, what he was hearing as "sounding better"
was simply because the LP was louder than the HD feed and my set-up procedure
should eliminate that. Then we listened to the HD feed all the way through,
then he put on the 50-year old record and after I made sure the volume was
the same, we listened to that. There was no doubt about it. a 50 year-old LP
on a $900 record player was much more musical, imaged better, had much better
sheen to the strings, etc. The record was just much more relaxing to listen
to. Even our host's wife agreed as did another buddy we'd invited. Next we
compared the CD layer of the Reiner disc (through the Weiss) to the Classics
reissue LP, and again, the LP was just much nicer to listen to. It sounded
more real, had better string tone, and threw a wider and deeper soundstage,
etc..

All who listened this evening, agreed that a relatively cheap record player
TROUNCED a $7000 highly touted 'state-of-the-art' DAC.

I admit that this isn't very scientific and there's plenty of room for slip
between the audio quality of the various "versions" of these two venerable
analog "classics" , but at the very least it shows that we shouldn't be too
quick to pronounce the death of vinyl yet... even OLD vinyl. There's still a
lot of musical enjoyment to had there.