What equipment do you use?

PS. The 300B valve (tube for our transatlantic friends) was designed about 82 years ago for the first cinema amplifiers. How's that for progress....

You may well have a point, as there's no doubt both recording and reproduction technologies have changed over the past few decades.

But there's as much 'subjective preference' in the old(er) approaches as in the new(er) ones - eg, a 'company sound' (surely either a recorded sound is faithful to the original or it's not?), what constituted 'ideal recorded sound' (surely there's just one 'ideal'), the distortion of valve amplifiers (it may be pleasant distortion, but it's distortion nonetheless), the various types of distortion inherent on LPs, not to mention the limited dynamic range of vinyl.

Plus, comments like "Serious listeners bought serious kit. Note Tagalie's comment on those who don't care listening only on poor quality mp3 players" seem a bit inaccurately judgemental.  

'Serious' kit may just be better marketed than 'other' kit, rather than providing any real sonic benefit. People who 'care' about the music may be more interested in listening to the actual music than what it 'sounds' like. Eg, one of the most moving things I heard was on my bedside clock-radio - a mono and doubtless very cheap speaker with a limited range.  It just happened to be played when I was listening - but it was the music that mattered, not how I was listening to it.

 Stereo imaging is an interesting specific issue. It's often cited as a hallmark of a good recording. But, speaking personally, whenever I've heard an orchestra or a band, it's very hard - if not impossible - to pin-point the origin of a specific instrument - it's certainly never as distinct as it appears to be on some recordings.

Maybe if you'd been writing when stereo was introduced, you might be bemoaning how faddish stereo is, and how mono is a superior technology, or debating narrow v broad separation (see, eg, 'Stereo Waxing in Pioneer Stage as Techniques Vary' in The Billboard, January 1959).

It's also tempting to wonder if you'd detect the subjective differences you mention - 'presence', 'immediacy' - if you didn't know what source you were listening to.

I have no doubt that there are genuine differences in the quality of recordings - between ones made at different times, and between different recordings made at about the same time.  I just think a lot of the differences are more subjective than you suspect.

To answer some of SpiderJon's comments there are two very obvious differences in recording quality currently on the G player with the Mahler 10 excerpts. Placing the Rattle after the Chailly does the former no favours sonically. I would say the Chailly has some presence & immediacy whilst to my ears the Rattle is somewhat dull & acoustically dead.

By company sound perhaps I should have said venue sound as very few venues were used in the early days of stereo. Decca used the Kingsway Hall & Walthamstow Town Hall whilst EMI used Kingsway & Abbey Road with occasional forays to the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. They did use the Free Trade Hall in Manchester to record the Halle but I once read EMI did not like that venue & preferred to record the Halle when they visited London although of course Pye, initially with the Mercury team, did successfully use this venue. Overseas EMI were mainly using the Salle Wagram in Paris whilst Decca used the Victoria Hall in Geneva & the Sofiensaal in Vienna. The Victoria Hall did have a deeper richer sound than the others but it did remain consistent even as Roy Wallace, who made the first ever stereo recording issued commercially in Europe there in 1954 (Rimsky Korsakov's Antar which still sounds pretty good on CD), experimented with different microphone techniques. In my opinion these recordings are, to quote Quad's (was it?) slogan "the closest approach to the original sound".

As to dynamic range I find more than enough on some Mahler & Bruckner symphony LPs.

 CDs are by no means exempt from distortion as Noel Keywood has written on many occasions in Hi Fi World magazine. I don't particularly want to start a valve vs transistor debate, not least as I have never owned a transistor amplifier: each has its adherents. Transistor amps are however by no means exempt from distortion. Most operate in Class B mode (the much praised Sugden being one of the few exceptions) which gives rise to crossover distortion which has to be tamed by the designer. As most valve amps operate in Class A mode they have no crossover distortion. Also transistor amps usually have more feedback than valve amps which can affect the sound. My 300B SE amp has no feedback. The aforementioned magazine recently tested 8 amplifiers from £1200 to £1500 and awarded first prize jointly to a £1200 valve amp & £1500 transistor amp: each to his own!

Ultimately of course it is the music that matters otherwise I wouldn't spend so much of my time listening to transfers of 78s.

Just to note that I set up my A38 amp tonight.  "Out-of-the-box" it sounds great (perhaps a bit rough for the first 30 mins, but it was in a very cold box!) and the string problem is minimised - as I'd hoped.  Of course, having been sensitised to it, I'll always be looking for over-brightness from now on.  The A38 promises to be a very capable piece of kit.  When it settles in, I'll do some serious listening and find out if it really does the business.

P.S. I've got a T32 tuner, not a 62 (senior moment!) but for some reason can't edit my own post.  All my other posts seem to be available.  Ideas?

It seems a rather misleading comment by Mr Keywood.

The criticism of "transistors designed for general industrial use" is something of a strawman - transistors can be (and are) designed for audio use as well. 

Similarly, transistor-based amps can be designed to operate without feedback, too.  

So whatever issue Mr Keywood might have with transistor-based amplifiers, it's not that transistors can't be designed for audio use, nor the fact that simply because they're transistors they must, of necessity, require feedback.

In any case, feedback is not inherently "bad". True, if mis-applied it can produce terrible results - but so can a badly designed amp without feedback.

If feedback is correctly designed and results in linearity and very low levels of  distortion (take your pick which type you think less of is better), what's the issue?

Also, whilst you may be eliminating feedback in the final stage of  amplification between your source and your speakers, there will almost inevitably have been feedback used in the systems that recorded, mastered and manufactured the source you're using.  

If the sound has survived all that, it seems unnecessary - or at least  pointless - to seek to eliminate feedback in the 'final stage', as it's not going to undo any harm already done by feedback circuits earlier in the chain - and, on the assumption you think the source is of sufficient quality to listen to, any earlier use of feedback presumably didn't cause any harm anyway.

Just a few would suffice, although the more you can give, the more likely people will have one or more of them, in order to be able to make a comparison for themselves.

Thanks - although I think a simple list might have been preferable to so many images :-)

Sadly I only have one of those - the Pärt/Hillier. I'd agree it's an excellent recording.  But it's tricky to compare to a Mercury Living Presence recordings (as exemplars of a "recording of yore") - I'm really not sure which, if any, of the ones I have are sufficiently 'similar' to Pärt to enable a valid comparison of recording quality.

I do, however, have the Mercury Living Presence recording of Bartók's 'Concerto for Orchestra', performed by the LSO and Dorati, so it's a shame I don't also have the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Fischer.  But it will need to be something pretty special to "deliver much better sound" (as you put it) than the Mercury recording of the same work.