RMAF 2018 - Why Analog is Digital and How to Fix It - Peter Ledermann

2018 Seminars are sponsored by: EnjoyTheMusic.com

Why Analog is Digital and How to Fix It

Speaker: Peter Ledermann, Soundsmith

Last year I gave a general overview of the challenges of the life of a cartridge in trying to reclaim the information trapped in a vinyl groove, much like trying to find the Rosetta Stone of physics for analog reproduction. This year, I will briefly go over those issues, but extend it further to considerations of what exactly goes on at the groove/stylus interface and try to illuminate why and how different styli profiles interact with the other problems of analog reproduction. It is my hope that this talk will impart an intuitive understanding of how challenging it is to build a properly working phono cartridge.

I hope the listeners will leave with a good “gut feeling” of the difficulties that stylus, cantilever and cartridges face. This explanation in lay terms will hopefully impart some of the many challenges and design choices that face a phono cartridge designer in the effort to reduce stylus jitter, thereby increasing the “sampling rate” in an attempt to design an accurate analog stylus/groove system. If you leave with small portion of the understanding and “feel” of the complexity of such systems, I will have succeeded in making sure you never decide to become a cartridge designer. I will also discuss Soundsmith’s efforts to tame these systems that in truth, represent a far closer relationship to digital renderings from vinyl than analog, as they fall prey to the unavoidable physics that dominate such systems.