I apologise in advance for this rather extreme short essay. But it occurred to me that the processes music goes through in order to be reproduced via LP records would be in the realm of sado-masochistic novel writing if they had not already been invented.
This is meant to be comedy. But it’s not far from the truth!
This is Hi-Fi
So you’ve made this lush production, full-range sound, lots of dynamic range, in stereo. Perfectly edited, vivid, convincing audio with no noise or interruptions, and little distortion.
Oh, you’re filtering off everything below 40Hz, and mixing everything below 90Hz into mono, and dropping things above 16kHz? What on earth for? Double-basses are meant to be on the right of the orchestra aren’t they?
Now you’re going to change the frequency response of the whole thing quite madly so the high frequencies sear your ears while the low end is lost in hum? That sounds dreadful, to be honest.
You want to send it into a microscopic mechanical transducer?
But you’re not going to couple that transducer to another transducer with a rigid material, but instead attach it to a pointy thing and make it scratch its shape on a spinning piece of brittle plastic? And the plastic doesn’t stay at a constant speed, but starts around 50cm/sec but later slows down to below the speed of professional tape, maybe about 20cm/sec? And you have to put a vacuum cleaner behind the pointy sharp thing that carves so the bits it scratches away are sucked up? And the plastic doesn’t stay where it was put? And there’s dust in the room? And the plastic is affected by temperature?
Now you’re going to move that plastic into a chemical vat that looks more like a sheep-dip container than a concert hall, and you’re growing a layer of metal on it? Did I see you physically break the metal off the plastic? And you’re growing another layer on that, breaking it off like you burst open a bubble-pack; and you’re growing yet another layer on that? And after all that mess and bending and breakage, you’re squirting consumer-grade thermoplastic onto that and crushing it with the weight of a bus in the hope it might take up the same shape?
Are you sure that hole is exactly in the middle?
That thermoplastic isn’t really very hard, is it? But you say you want to take it through the open air into an average domestic room full of dust, and risk handling it outside any protective wrapping, with bare hands? What’s that platter you’re putting it on? Are you sure it’s clean?
Do you think it reasonable to force this malleable, soft, damageable, melt-prone plastic past a piece of incredibly-hard diamond kept in place by bits of rubber led by gravity and inertia, together with corrections that are almost impossibly small to determine? How on earth is this not going to damage the delicate plastic? The diamond isn’t even the same shape as the pointy thing that cut the hard plastic in the first place. And it isn’t meeting the slash in the plastic at quite the same angle the pointy thing made the cut in the harder plastic? And you balance the little diamond so carefully that it nearly but doesn’t leap out of the slash in the plastic, but it’s still deforming the plastic through friction because it’s so hard, and you’re slamming it into walls of soft plastic up to 20,000 times each second? What if you accidentally knock the little diamond?
Now you’re going to attach the diamond to another transducer the price of a house, and yet so delicate that the capacitance of the connecting cable affects the signal badly? And you’re going to roll off the top, boost the bottom so it rumbles, and amplify THAT so loudly that you can hear it but not so loudly that it, too, rattles the little diamond?
And THAT’s Hi-Fi?
, the autochanger based on the SP25, into a polished brown radiogram cabinet and wired the crystal cartridge to the input of the built-in valve radio/amplifier. The cabinet had a richly toned single speaker underneath, and this system of glowing radio dial and filaments played his classical LPs, the 7-inch singles my mother inherited from her DJ brother, and my children’s records, together with some shellac 78s from second-hand shops and relatives, played by 
and speech recordings too from companies like 
replaced in 1969 by a black box into which my father had installed a Sinclair IC10-based 10W amp, which lasted through the replacement of the cartridge with a ceramic item in 1971, then he built (with me holding the circuit-boards steady sometimes) the Practical Electronics Gemini stereo amp set in 1972. In the years of mass-market stereo LPs on “
“But it was a stereo hi-fi to US” (to misquote Eric Idle), and the leap forward into “sound sculpted in space” was never regretted.
them on the Radio 3 concerts. Sometimes the pitch wavered slowly. Nearly always the sound had a ‘fuzz’ with it toward the end of a side, particularly on French horns, muted brass and sopranos. None of this happened when I taped a cassette off the radio, and it was a crying shame that all recorded music for the masses had this gauze of dirt, this veil in front of it. I learned where every scratch was in the quiet passages of the symphonies and chamber music on the shelf, and was almost surprised when those noises didn’t occur where expected on radio performances. My parents didn’t mind the interruptions, but I knew this rubbish was not music, even though the frequency response ran smoothly from bottom to top and the amplifier’s distortion was almost below measurement. And it was sad that one poorly set-up pickup or arm could damage a precious recording for ever.
“Musicassettes” too often sounded muddy, though we rescued a reel-to-reel deck to play home-recorded tapes well; but no decent tapes were available unless recorded from Radio 3 concerts or the 
the CD came along. Teenagers (as I was then) can tell where 20kHz brickwall filters harm music, but at last, at long last, the music was almost completely pure. It did not waver or wobble. It was not interrupted by ticks and pops, nor by fuzz. Its quality was identical from beginning to end. There was no mourning that the beautiful passages of “