[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 19:49:26 -0700, bob wrote

I think most knowledgeable audio/music
enthusiasts would have to agree that decent vinyl performance is far
better than was Philips cassette performance - even WITH Dolby B and
HX Pro).

I was surely of that opinion back when such things mattered.

I always found commercially available cassettes to sound
lousy. Even on a Nakamichi 1000, they had much more wow and flutter
than an LP, they were noisier than an LP and always sounded
compressed. In short, they were lousy.

Agreed.

Of course, so were LPs. Of course only people who had heard well made high
speed tapes (e.g. 7 1/2 ips and higher) knew about it.

snip

All of them. Project. Music Hall, and Rega all make fine performing
"high-end" turntables. There's no market for any other kind.

I wouldn't call them "fine performing." But certain know-nothing
reviewers have anointed them "high-end," and that's been enough.

They have low wow/flutter,

They have up to six magnitudes more FM distortion than even mediocre
digital, and the FM distortion is often at similar frequencies.

the arms are low mass/low friction and dynamically balanced, and they do a
decent job of playing a record.

They are not appreciably better than the better products that we had in the
late 70s and early 80s. There has been no new signficant technical
innovations since then.

Of course they don't elicit the last word in resolution from one's vinyl
but they are better than any $89 direct-drive table from the 1980s.

If you set the bar low enough.

Also the above is an assertion with no reliable technical support.
Measurements? Reliable listening tests?

snip

But there are scores of new ones that have taken their place. The
absolute
bottom tier is gone, that's true. There are no more cheap mass-market
tables
from the likes of Pioneer, Yamaha, Panasonic etc.,

Not those brands in particular, but the low end is still well-
represented. Last time I was in Best Buy (a while ago), the only thing
they carried was a sub-$100 Sony. It's still made, and has plenty of
competition.

Yes, it seems that cheap tables from Numark, Ion, and Sony are still
available, but I must say that I've never seen one in a store.

It's all about what stores you visit.

They are all that I see in stores, including Best Buy. They are all over
the web. They are sold in ads in Sunday suppliments.

Numark tables show up from time-to-time in Music stores as "DJ equipment"
however.

There is plenty of evidence that at its peak, DJ LP sales dwarfed the
audiophile market.

Let's not forget that the only thing that kept vinyl alive in the 90s
AT ALL was the DJ market. (And they were not using the hamster-powered
belt drives of today's entry-level audiophile market.) The SL1200 is
out of production, but several copycats are still out there.

That was then, this is now. I never had a DD table that satisfied me,

That's all about your prejudices. Got any technical evidence that there is a
categoric and/or inherent technical problem with DD turntables?