i would say your spot on because no matter how you try there will always be a degree of mechanical noise caused by friction between the stylus and the vinyl, i think its probably nostalgia more then anything, i was listening to DAB a few weeks ago and was thinking more or less the same thing, its not like true radio as we knew it, the sound is totally different, can you imagine if short wave could be transfared to DAB it would be terrible there would be no fun trying to receive the stations furthest away and no drift between transmisions of different stations, radio luxembourg was a classic example with its fluctuating transmission right in the middle of your favirite song
Some very high end hifi also uses a combination of transistor and valve for a better sound I believe. I just love the idea of running a home made guitar through an old radio and getting some nice sounds out of it!
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you can buy valve pre amps as already mentioned and some guitarists use these as well as modern amps, its strange really that no one has managed to capture the true sound of a valve amp with modern technology
[cracks internet knuckles
It was a sight closer representation to the analogue sound of analogue instruments than any digital bastardisation.
In the early days of CD a hifi designer mate of mine (Jez Arkless, look him up) tried and better tried to convince ourselves that CD sounded better and failed. Part of the issue of course was the limited sampling rate (which as far as I know has never been increased)... as soon as you concentrated on the treble end you heard it falling to pieces. Real instruments don't do that.
Granted you could theoretically engineer some better dynamic range in, but listen to Private Investigations up loud on a decent turntable and you'll find yourself flinching at some of the string plucks - and that was recorded and mastered in the analogue domain long before it got to CD, where it never sounded as good.
The real reason CD took off (and MP3 et al since) is simply down to convenience: you can get 18 tracks on a CD, shuffle them, fall asleep and not find your £150 stylus going kssssshhhhhh-thunk when you wake up. You can bang a million tracks of compressed, sampled and castrated so-called 'music' on an Ipod and go jogging around the world without hearing the same tune twice. Between over-compressed middle-of-the-road 1980s rock and Amstrad 'hifi systems' the world has failed to realise what it's missing.
I'm just as guilty as the next man: I haven't paid for any music since I got my first PC, I have a selection of cheap MP3 players mostly full of music that pre-dates the invention of CD and meanwhile my Rega Planar 3, Armstrong 625 and B&W DM4s sit quietly in the lounge, gathering dust... though to be fair that's largely because I have a moaning old tw4t of a neighbour who gripes if I plump up my pillows too noisily so the chances of cranking the volume are limited to the one week a year when they sod-off on a Club 90-200 holiday somewhere - if I realise they're not around to complain...
I still have a ex Navy Marconi CR100 receiver which I paid £20 for in about 1984, me and a pal carried it the 4 miles home between us. Set up an aerial and plugged in the high impedance headphones and turned it on - the lights came on but no sound!Forgot to say, as a radio ham in my youth I had a number of ex-military short-wave receivers, most of which saw service in WW2 (B40, HRO, R1155 etc) and were at the cutting-edge of technology in their day. The B40 was made by Murphy (a name that was sadly reduced to placarding any amount of plastic crap made in the Far East in the 80s) and was built to a Navy spec for ship-borne RXs. Mine still picked up Radio Moscow and Voice Of America (and the Russian Woodpecker!) fine when I last saw it in about 1985.
The HRO was the opposite end of the spectrum, built down to a price in a shed ( the story goes that the factory job number was filled-in as Hell Of A Rush and soon abbreviated to HOR, but that was thought a bit rude so they changed it to HRO, all these years later and I still don't know if it's true
Had a few HV belts of them when teaching myself electronics... I never did get on with valves. My mate Jez did; I think he built his first valve radio aged about 7.
