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RE: "And I know that feedback steals the soul from the music"...

> > Isn't a tonne of negative feedback utilized to linearize cutting head response? < <

Absolutely true.

There are some places where the sonic effects of negative feedback are far less deleterious to sound quality than other places. For reasons I only partially understand, vacuum tubes (for example) are far less damaged by the presence of negative feedback than solid-state devices.

Yet in every single case I have heard, when the negative feedback is removed (such as has become relatively common among modern vacuum-tube preamps) the sound quality improves tremendously in terms of coherency and overall musical believability - and most importantly of all, in the ability to emotionally engage us in the *music* itself.

So while I cannot deny that vinyl LPs made with high-feedback cutterheads can make great sounding records, my natural question is "what if someone were able to make a cutterhead free from the resonances found in "normal" cutterheads, so that negative feedback were no longer required?"

My guess is that the results would be truly staggering, and a huge step closer to an all-analog magnetic tape recorder - which to the best of my knowledge has never been made with zero-feedback electronics either. Which leads to my next "what if" question....

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  • RE: "And I know that feedback steals the soul from the music"... - Charles Hansen 11/4/1721:12:54 11/4/17 (0)
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