by Mark Morris Equipment used: Home-built PC Cambridge Audio DAC Magic Plus ACER T232HL 23” touch-screen monitor Sonic Frontiers Line 2 tube pre-amplifier Sonic Frontiers Power 1 and Radford STA-15 MkIII power amplifiers KEF 107 Reference loudspeakers 78s, LPs, CDs, reel-to-reel and cassette, laser disc and DVD – if you collect recordings of classical music and you are an audiophile you really need to have the ability to play all of these in your audio system (and I missed out cylinders and 8-tracks, but enough said…). Or do you? Nearly everything is now available in digital format, and Google usually takes only 0.46 seconds to find it. I could, for example, listen to Mosolov’s Steel Foundry recorded in 1936 by the Orchestre Symphonique of Paris conducted by Julius Ehrlich on-line. But that really isn’t the same as gingerly lifting out of its sleeve the incredibly rare original 78 I brought back from the UK this summer (triple bubble-wrapped in my suitcase), putting it on the 78 turntable, and listening to the clamorous, motoristic cacophony as it was heard and recorded eighty years ago. There is, of course, something about the tactile quality of handling real physical media that makes [...]
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