Analogic?

You may be right Graham, yet each and every day we are nearer to what is probably our common nightmare - all audio in form of a chip in our PC.

We all know analogue has its set of problems, just as digital does. Digital is much more recent, so the many false promises made about it are much fresher in our minds, but if truth is to be told, we were fed a heck of a lot bull about analog too in the early seventies.

Remember "SQ4"? Remember "Quadraphonic"? I'm reasonably sure you do, but do you recall reading the comments made by the Paul Klipsch in 1949? When he said we should have THREE channels for music, not two, adding a center channel to the usual left and right?

Remember the Fletcher-Munson curve? The one they first tried to emulate by adding the "loudness" or "physiological" switches, just before they overdid it and made mockery of a perfectly good research project?

Remember the pains we had to undergo with purely analogue to rid oursleves of too much noise? The companders? Dolby A (pro), Dolby B and C (home)? The dBX story? The High Com story?

Would you still like, at this ripe age, to fiddle around with 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2 and 4 inch tapes running at abnormal speeds so they can eventually produce the overdubbed sound they wanted? Before you ask, yes, I am a masochist, so I have kept mu open reel tape deck AND my cassette deck, I have fond memories of using them a lot. And I never miss a chance of eyeballing some German made ASC tape decks, notably the 6000 series, on German e-bay. Nor seeing my old Uher Royal de Luxe tape recorder being sold off for junk prices.

And I ain't NEVER gonna sell my venerable AR94 floorstanding speakers, the last serious model from a once famous company, the world's first 2.5 way speaker. But I did buy a Denon DVD-3910 all-rounder, because that's the way of the world, and I must say, the praise it gathered in its time is well deserved.

Please don't go Luddite on us.