Well... Speaking of turntables - I recently got my father’s Garrard 301 with SME pickup arm brought back from Ireland thanks to Fintan O’Neill. I have no idea how much this cost my Dad back in the day but know that he bought through a combination of paying hard earned money and the good old fashioned barter system. The Garrard 301 BTW is now regarded as a collector’s item by audiophiles and I am about go down the path of bringing it back to life. Step one involves a new plinth while the SME arm will go to Canada for repair and rewiring. As time goes by I will post on the progress but in the meantime I’m going to touch on the much discussed subject of vinyl versus CD etc...

I have been playing Vinyl, CDs, Digital Audio files (aiffs, mp3s etc) on the stereo at home when I have a minute - usually later at night. So far, I have been playing the vinyl on a turntable I received courtesy of Jon Mele, who also happens to play the drums in the O’Rourkestra. Even with the turntable being as Jon described, the weakest link in my system - vinyl still sounds the best on it. Or wait, does it? The answer is yes until I started playing flac (lossless audio) & aiffs on a Logitech Squeezebox server. The Squeezebox sounded good by itself, playing flacs from a usb flash drive or using and HP MediaSmart server BUT it wasn’t until I got an Emotiva DAC recently that I started to hear audio that rivaled vinyl for sound imaging and sound stage. I rate vinyl and DAC treated audio files top of the charts followed closely by SACDs so maybe vinyl will seize the lead again when the Garrard is brought back to action!

More soon...


David