Hello,

Has anyone compared classic records vinyl with original 50's 60's
first pressings?

Does anyone know if they use tube amps to cut masters (record cutting
head amps..that is)?

I started buying Vinyl again after listening to some old pressings of
lp's (50's to mid-70's).
After designing and building audio gear for recording for 20 years,
I tried to get the closest sound to the source that I could by
concentrating on cleaning up the digital converters , and just stopped
thinking about the whole vinyl vs. LP thing years ago when I sold my
records.

I remember reading an old MIX magazine article where Bernie Grundman
(Ibelieve) Was saying that first generation laquers were superior to
digital, and that LP's had an extended freq response etc. etc. but a
letter to the editor in a successive issue illustrated that most home
users could not afford a high end system that could compete with CD
fidelity -- wise. I was one of those home users.

After years of recording sound, building preamps and experimenting
with tubes and transistors (fet or otherwise) I realized that there
was something more compelling about tubes and something that made the
music sound more distant with transistor circuits.

Make a simple amplifier with a triode (a good large plate w/ no
feedback) and you get a little thd etc. , but an accurate sonic and
musical image.

Make a simple amp with a transistor and you will most probably want
to connect another transistor in series (to use in a negative feedback
configuration) in order to get rid of the nasty harsh distortion
characteristics. You will then experience more loss of detail and
phase incoherence, although the added harmonics will be reduced.

This is due to the fact that negative feedback works well in theory
but can only work 100% when the input and output of the signal are
constantly aligned in the time domain (including during sharp
transients in the waveform)

Negative feedback in slower amplifiers (transistors included) causes
distortion of transients.

So the most musical designs to me are the simple tube amps with very
high quality components.

Getting back to vinyl, I noticed that when I played a 50's pop
record made here in europe (probably with german studio amplifiers)
the voice seemed to belong to someone in the room (this is not a
'clean' recording)

I checked this at another person's house with his solid state amp and
comparisons between cd's and original pressings made before the 80's
and the results were the same -- the music seemed played by living
musicians.
the FEEL of the music cuts through.
In digital the feel is lost in part.

Any accomplished musician about the importance of timing and touch,
or at least any great INTERPRETER will know. A great sounding voice
will not move as many people or sell more records than a voice with
GREAT timing and feel.

the ear is most sensitive to sharp transients and wave-FORM (as
opposed to frequency response and thd etc.) much more than the
industry and consumers would care to admit, for ignorance's sake or
for convenience's sake.

In short I believe that the transistor - opamp - digital revolution
has caused the time-resolution of recordings to go downhill.


So big analog tape decks with simple tube amps made with high quality
transformers and components (not like a lot of 50's 60's
electronics--whick were just plain cheap) are the way to go, and vinyl
is the best way of getting at least the essence of the music into the
home (I still have to hear sacd though)


Records cut before the late '60s were cut with tube amplifiers driving
the cutting head.

by the 80's the cutting machines were complicated and I have seen one
Neumann machine with a digital delay in line with the signal used as a
pre-delay to determine groove-to-groove distance while cutting the
side.
Far from analog. It also passed through orban parametric eq's (cheap
opamps) and god knows what.

Anyone have similar feelings about this?