At the risk of high jacking the thread... I sort of think this will my next upgrade, although it will cost an arm and a leg!
The Grados fall in the middle, they are moving iron. They also sound very good.
Then you got the Soundsmith strain gauge and the DS Audio optical cartridges.
Are you sure about Brothers In Arms? I think the answer is a lot more complicated than that...
https://www.analogplanet.com/content/brothers-arms -45rpm-mobile-fidelity
I got one of those too... mostly for it's ADC. I have the feeling, heck, I know, it'm barely scratching the surface of what it can do.
What kind of SAW software do you run with it?
Read it out of curiosity......Never knew about those!.....quite a technical advance....!!!
I think this thread has been well and truly hijacked lol..
This thread has more than run it's coarse. I've learned as much as needed to answer my original question. There is a bit of a monetary/value mismatch to most solutions, but that's the vinyl market I suppose, so it's take it or leave it. And in my case, I doubt i'll invest any more into the format as I remain unconvinced on vinyls 'god' tier quality.
Thanks to all who genuinely wanted to help. Not so much to those who are more interested in arguing irrelevancies or asserting bogus facts.
I think it's probably time mods lock the thread... but either way, I don't think I'll be posting in this one anymore.
Cheers.
Actually DS claims about electric cartridge snr are widely false and, as any guy who knows the true max dynamic range of an analogue optical setup the optical catridges are basically in the cassette tape + dolby B snr range just that the dynamic is actually the true limiting factor here...Reducing the reading area as DS claims to reduce cart weight reduces the dynamic range to the snr area also. The signal looks more quiet, but also has reduced dynamic range compared to traditional electrical pickup.LED+ photovoltaic detector noise are usually higher than any mm electrical cartridge noise and even if you remove the electronics attached to it.These guys preffer to fool themselves and pay even more money for nothing because they have no ideea what thermal background radiation means....
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They just sound like themselves.
A modern trumpet sounds dynamic and wet and clear and LOUD... a saxophone has a lot of overtones... a violin and violoncello sound soft when bowed, clean when plucked... an acoustic guitar has the overtones of the frets, a drum kit a whole bunch of sounds.... etc. By definition there is no warm or cold sound to an acoustic instrument, they are what they are.
The difference here is that the snr on film is significantly higher due to optical medium anysotropy and general opacity vs cartridge's air inside a black box, but the encoded reading area on film is also wider than the one offered by the cartridge stylus movement while in small spaces there's little room to deal with optical coherence and filtering of the light signal...and I can't imagine a cooled cartridge either to fight infrared background radiation . Optical reading on film also used dolby or dbx noise reduction systems .
I use it as a DAC and headphone amp, but often utilize the EQ and dsp capability. Its a pretty amazing sounding piece of equipment. Very well thought out for a single piece of gear.
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Do you agree if the sound system have low distortion can not sound like real acoustic instrument, but higher distortion sound system can sound like real acoustic instrument, than it must be something wrong in music production?
Science is about models. Models which represent an interpretation of what we think is happening and that are consistent with developed methods that allow us to measure what we experience within the "world view" of these models AND predict heretofore expected behavior that can also be measured.
As a rule of thumb, models that measure our world view and predict other behavior that is also measurable are called "laws" and "theorems".
But make no mistake, "Laws" and "theorems" are just models.
The Classical Greeks had their own "scientific laws" and they served them well under their epistemology.
Note: read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
In current audio reproduction we have certain "laws" and theorems. It doesn't mean that our science of psychoacoustics is complete nor that we have developed a world view that explains why we hear what we hear and how we hear it.
The current EE based methods of measuring electronic behavior are woefully incomplete when it comes to audio reproduction, if they were complete we would not be discussing this.
Heck, this is DIYAudio, so let me paraphrase Nelson Pass: There are many amplifiers that measure perfect but don't sound realistic.
That simple statement is sufficient to invalidate the entire premise, promulgated by the Julian Hirsh Flat Earth Society, and ASR, that we know what makes an audio component "good". We really have no clue, we really don't know what to design and measure for proper psychoacoustic reproduction because we do not fully understand psychoacoustics... we don't really know how it works. Perhaps some types of distortion, phase alignment, etc.. are required for us to hear properly. Who knows?
In the meantime, we design components that follow what we think is important... yet, as in "voicing" components, often it becomes an iterative listening/guessing game.... making the components sound "good", even as the measurements don't look so "perfect". Huh?
So, to answer you question, we can put together a system that sounds pleasant and perhaps, by pure luck, sounds somewhat realistic. But we have no well defined process to reach that goal nor do we know how to record and recreate an actual musical event.
Anyone who says the science is settled is lying and/or ignorant.
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No amplifier is prefect. Bu somewhat I agree with you.
But if we think only sound reproduction, we should assume the reproduction is prefect. But it is not.
I think the sound engineer should the target product play in sound system with lowest distortion, highest slew rate, etc.
So they can play correctly at that type of sound system.
I found TV sound adequate in TV's sound system but sound bad in hi-fi sound system.
I found some record, usually old record sound good using same old amplifier and sound bad in my amplifier.
I found some hi-res record sound bad in some old amplifier, but sound very good in my amplifier.
This is why I think the reproduction quality also depend on production quality also.
Optical film used to use photocell receptors. Optical cartridges use electrically buffered, optically focused phototransistor receptors. Not the same things at all. Also, optical cart electrical output signals are much larger than the very low level signals produced by MC transducers. Stray pickup of hum and noise due to the very low signal levels is one problem with MC. Another problem is that magnetic hysteresis affects the sound, so they sound something more or less like a iron-core transformer does. Optical doesn't have that type of coloration and distortion. Seems quite a stretch from someone who has never heard good optical phono to speculate about how it can't possibly work all that well based on erroneous modeling assumptions.
Originally tube, of course. Most of the ones I worked with were silicon solar cells. They worked surprisngly well. I have used solar cells and photo diodes as pickup for a laser beam wiggled by a mirror.
I do think the optical phono pickup is clever, no idea about the noise floor of the photo transistor.