Well, snap crackle pop sure is a pain. There is also cost of maintenance of a large collection, and inconvenience of having to flip over the record every 20 minutes, and the whole ritual of getting a record out, etc.
The theorem that says that you can get all the info up to N hertz with a sampling rate slightly over 2N hertz is fine, too. Fourier theory is fine, too.
There remains the issue of implementation. That's where the devil has his little shack.
Now Frank claims that he has found a silicon sword to slay this evil dragon, and who the heck am I to say he's lying? Well,
maybe he's doing a little marketing speak, but really it's just a
little itty teeny bit of that and I think we can cut him some slack because, in the end, it seems to be informed by the bigger picture.
What's that bigger picture that I'm referring to, you ask? (You did ask, didn't you??). Ok, let me flesh that out.
If you absolutely, positively cannot stand the idea of having a silicon transistor in your signal path, then, true, vinyl will give you a way to avoid that problem. You must put that problem on one side of the scale, and consider the imperfections associated with capturing a sonic waveform and etching it onto a master platter which is then pressed in an industrial process onto thousands of vinyl platters, which is then transported (hopefully sans heat) to the record store, which is then transported (once again, sans heat) into your living room shelves. After you've dealt with all those considerations, we proceed to the aforementioned snap crackle pop headaches; to which we must add the engineering challenges associated with getting an
eety bitty teeny tiny little stick to, say, oscillate a magnet inside a coil, out of which must come 10 electronic octaves of music with perfect accuracy.
And finally, vinyl was a fluid the last time I checked (which was quite a while ago) and back in the day we worried about records warping if they sat vertically on a shelf for decades, and of course a worse fate if you stacked them horizontally. Might be a false myth, but you gotta worry about it.
Now before you object that CDs have their physical issues as well, may I remind you that we are talking about 0s and 1s and plastic CDs are but one way to transfer them; nowadays all my 0s and 1s are on double-backups on hard drives and I'm pretty sure that they'll survive with full integrity longer than I will.
So I'd say that the obsolence of vinyl in hifi is a valid assertion. There can be exceptions, but they are expensive and time consuming, and if we do a proper cost-benefit analysis then the next step is almost certainly not to transition back to vinyl, but rather to donate to your local symphony, jazz clubs, and music academies.
So it's fine if you want to work harder to get better sound! But please consider putting that additional hard work into the pocket of working musicians and concert hall workers first, and record-company executives and lawyers last.
