Speaker(s) Recommendation for Vinyl

Some passive speakers driven by an analogue amplifier with a phono stage. Don’t see why people want to spend lots of money on turntables and connect to something that digitises the sound and then undoes it again to play on a speaker… 😉

Thanks for the non answer.

If you mean which Sonos speakers I’d lean to a pair of Fives, if you are not satisfied with the low end (you likely will be) add a Sub to them.

If you mean any speakers but powered by the Sonos Amp, well it is really a matter of sonic taste. I’d think a pair of Klipsch, the Hersey in small or La Scalla in medium sizes.

https://www.klipsch.com/products/heresy-iv-floorstanding-speaker

https://www.klipsch.com/products/la-scala-al-5

Thanks for the suggestions!

Please don’t tell your spouse I suggested the La Scallas, mine has not forgiven me for inflicting them on her decor even though they left in 93 or so.

Made great garage speakers until we downsized.

We've had posters who didn't know the Line-In was converted to digital who gushed over the "pure analog" sound of LPs on Sonos that "blows digital streaming away".  When informed that they were actually listening to digital music, they were dumbfounded.  Which they shouldn't be, because digital reproduces the analog signal exactly, wirh no signal loss, as stated by Nyquist-Shannon.

Why would you say that? Digital cannot reproduce an analogue signal exactly. At the very simplest level, because you get quantisation distortion - an inevitable result of cutting the signal up into a series of discrete values rather than a continuously changing waveform.

When you turn those discrete values back into a continuously changing waveform at the loudspeaker, the DAC has to guess what originally filled in the gaps, and that cannot be “exact”.

It would probably be fair to say that most people can’t hear the difference, or not sufficiently well to pick one from the other in double-blind testing, but that’s not the same as perfection.

Audiophiles writing articles early in the digital audio transition were mathematically challenged and ran out of the lecture early, waving their arms in the air about “jaggies”. This gave rise the widespread misconception that digital is inherently inferior to analog. They should have stayed for the full lecture.

Here are some details for the mathematically inclined.
 

The situation was complicated in the late 1970’s into the 1980’s because hard core analog audio designers thought they could just paste a few chips onto their design and have a quality digital product. Likewise, the digital designers thought they could paste a few transistors or tubes onto their digital design and have adequate analog output. Both crews violated some basic design rules known to the other side and the result was less than optimal. In fairness, the colleges had just begun to offer adequate digital courses and there were relatively few trained engineers available.
 

Early CD’s did not sound very good. This was due to sloppy work in the studio and the CD players. The audiophiles latched on to this saying, “See, we told you so!”. And this has stuck with the popular culture. At this point virtually all of the engineers who were designing the less than adequate products have retired. 
 

I think that those who are listening to CD’s produced in the early 1980’s have a valid point when they complain: “sounds bad.”

While I agree that there’s a huge amount of misunderstanding about the strengths and weaknesses of digital storage and transmission, the one thing that you cannot avoid is loss of information.

When you sample an analogue sound at a given rate, you cannot avoid loss. Everything between your sample points is thrown away. That is inevitable - but of course it’s necessary, because you have to place a limit on how much information you want to store and convey somewhere else.

I’m not saying this because I’m any sort of audiophool. I haven’t listened to any purely analogue sources for many many years, and I abandoned vinyl long ago - though my reasons were more to do with convenience and lack of degradation than any other.

What I’m trying to emphasise is that saying that a digital copy of an analogue source can be exact is completely wrong. It can only ever be an approximation, and when it gets turned back into analogue the DAC has to make guesses about the missing information (i.e. interpolation between the sample points). These days, that process is very well understood, and the results are typically extremely accurate, as far as human hearing is concerned.

You may have left the lecture early.

Once you’ve decided the bandwidth that you want to digitize, frequencies above that must be filtered or there will be in-band mischief. At that point there is nothing to fall between sample points. You can argue that removing harmonics above 20KHz alters the music, but that’s another discussion. How many humans can benefit from having these harmonics available?