That's right! Some of their stuff costs 6 figures, so it's good to keep that in mind.
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If Apple Designed a Turntable, This Is Probably What It Would Look Like
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CD quality uses 48 Khz. Not even a dog can hear at 48 Khz…
There’s also 96 Khz and higher sampling rates. The idea behind analog having better quality is that analog media doesn’t have a sampling limit and can capture harmonics that digital media can’t capture.
Now we have Lossless (no compression) sampling…
What‘s needed is equipment that would reproduce all the frequencies without distorting or getting saturated.
Old School speaker columns had multiple size speakers to cover a determined frequency range, and huge magnets so they would last forever. Each speaker column had an audio crossover to split the frequencies for each individual speaker.
Now people basically buy speakers that are basically a tweeter and midrange, and complement it with a subwoofer.
It’s just a way to fool people into thinking those are great speakers.
Any audiophile would notice the difference in a second.
I still have some old Sansui 100W RMS speakers, and they sound excellent. I used them for karaoke, but someone’s dog peed on them and the bottom part of the enclosures are starting to break apart. One of these days I would like to make new exclosures; I’d just need to buy some tools and find time to do it.
Sorry to be pedantic but typically, audio CD's are 44.1kHz rather than 48kHz. And that is the sampling rate not bandwidth/frequency which, given Nyquist and skirt/transition band, is over half the sample rate.
So arguably a dog, who supposedly have a range all the way up to 60kHz, could potentially hear everything on a 48kHz recording (max frequency would be 24kHz, although skirt would reduce that a little further).
"endless static tics". A little biased? I have many albums that have almost zero of that, and if you've released an LP you should know about the RIAA equalization curve which solved the bass issue. I doubt you even know how you get two channel audio out of one grove. Hint, one channel is the back and forth within the groove, the other channel comes from up and down motion where the grove gets wider and narrower as the needle moves through it.
From 1968 to 2000 I bought over 3000 LP's and not a single one did NOT have static ticks and pops out of the cardboard/plastic sleeve. I don't know what planet YOU live on or what laboratory clean room you live in, but out here in the real world this was a known fact. And I didn't mention high frequency degradation with each play. As far as the RIAA curve, it never came close to what is available with digital, which is why all the disc cutting schemes over the years like spacing grooves further apart.
Discs will forever be like plowing a filthy rocky field with a plow at a microscopic level. The only thing I regret is the space it used to take up in a home as a sign of how important music was to a person and the size of LP covers. That's it. Purely cosmetic, graphic, and environmental. And the only reason I still have my LP's, because I certainly never play them unless it's one of the rare ones not available in a digital format. Even transferred to digital from disc is better because of the high frequency degradation with every play. But then the nightmare of using a plugin that destroys fades to remove, yes, the static tics and pops.
You might have had some kind of hygiene issue to have 3000 albums with defects. Sure, I’ll get a defective album every now and then. In which case I’ll return it so I can get a non-defective copy in exchange. But you got 3000 of them? Every single one? The issue points to you my friend.
High frequency degradation? Another imagined or highly localized issue. Perhaps you’re familiar with the CD-4 quadraphonic system? The entire functionality of that required the accurate playback and decoding of FM signals, which live high up in the ultrasonic range far beyond what you or I could hear.
If the high frequencies on a disc were somehow damaged upon playback, the highest frequencies would be the first to go, and those CD-4 discs would never play back more than once.
Don’t get me wrong, groove wear is a very real problem, and anyone browsing records in a thrift store for more than 3 seconds will encounter it. But record wear on a properly designed and setup playback system (not a plastic piece of junk with a nickel taped to the headshell) is so low as to be completely neglible, and records can be played thousands of times, for decades and decades, with no degradation to the quality of playback. The TLDR is “take care of your stuff”
Finally, you say “ all the disc cutting schemes over the years like spacing grooves further apart.” and I say you must have never spent any time in a mastering room, ever.
Every disc cutting computer in use since the 1960’s has worked very, very hard to space the grooves as CLOSE together as possible. The most advanced would be the disc cutting computers in the Neumann VMS-80 or VMS-82 as they can calculate and adjust the minimum amount of space needed on the disc surface down to every 1/16th of a revolution, based on the advance signal coming off the preview head on a suitable mastering tape deck. They slow down the feedscrew so as to slow down the constant inward movement of the cutterhead.
What you stated could not have been further from the actual truth if you tried.
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If one or two static ticks destroy 45 minutes of listening to an album for you, then you should never had bought 3,000 LPs.
You are the perfect candidate for using PS Audio NeWave Phono Converter. Now discountinued but you can find them used, and there are similar devices from other companies but PS Audio's is one of the best. I use one for this purpose and it is also my moving coil preamp. Then use the program VinylStudio. Not only can you convert all your filthy rocky fields to wonderful FLAC files, the software can remove all your pops and clicks and also fix other gremlins that keep you up at night. I've taken some fairly beat up albums from high school concerts that are almost unplayable and got them to be fairly good to listen to in digital format.
But from what I can tell you're the glass half empty type and there will be a reason you're gonna hate this solution too. Time to move on. Hate to waste time but if it helps you then a soul has been saved!
There is actually a better solution which was a Japanese turntable by ELP that used laser light to read the grooves. No physical contact whatsoever. Unfortunately according to wikipedia it sometimes read the dirt and grit in the grooves as well. Over $12,000.
I remember reading a review of a turntable using lasers to play the LP about 1990 in Hi-Fi News and Record Review. From what I recall, the reviewer indicated the records had to be very clean. A good quality cleaning system was mandatory. Past this, I seem to recall the opinion that the sound quality was more on a level of a turntable a fraction of the price.
Still, though, an interesting idea--and one can see uses for it. A library might, for example, have need to play LPs, but be more concerned with preserving them than they would be in maximizing sound quality.
In the 2000’s the ELP corporation sent me 2 demo CDs featuring tracks transferred with the Laser Turntable. I should still have one of them laying around somewhere… Performance was not very good but it was more interesting for what it could do in an archival setting that a conventional pickup couldn’t. Cracked shellac? Fragile/flaky lacquer? No problem.
One thing it did have trouble with - colored vinyl pressings, since it reflected the laser back differently. Even some grades of “black” vinyl were troublesome apparently.
If the disc was not pristine and spotless, you would have problems. Much more trouble than a conventional turntable. microscopic traces of dirt or dust that would be inconsequential to a stylus would be very problematic for the laser. You practically did need a clean room type situation in order to use this thing. They only sold the ELP as a bundle with a motorized vacuum record cleaning machine since it’d be pointless to try and play your records without one.
The player was expensive ($10-15K IIRC) and as the technology was not picked up or further developed/cost reduced by any major electronics manufacturers, the tech stagnated and ultimately went nowhere.
I heard that Stevie Wonder owned at least one ELP machine, possibly two, as it simplified record playback for him greatly but he is very particular when it comes to his audio and I can’t say I’d be surprised if he didn’t use it for very long.