The Miraculousness Of Vinyl Playback

I was listening to a few records with my friend Stephen the other night. I lowered the stylus of my Sumiko Blackbird cartridge mounted to a Rega P23 turntable feeding a Simaudio Moon LP 5.3 phonostage and thought, "This is the culmination of over 100 years of R&D, how many other current audio playback platforms can claim THAT??" A tiny needle point drops into a groove of polyvinyl binder substances stamped with micro grooves embedded with vibration cues which are picked up by the needle, transferred to the stylus pole which relays the information to tiny magnets mounted in the cartridge body. The magnets amplify these impulses into a signal which is sent along wires to outputs that feed a device which amplifies then corrects the wave forms according to a pre-emphasis curve. This device sends the amplified and corrected signal to the input of a switching device like a pre-amplifier which then De-emphasizes the radical equalization curve. The end of the line is tangible, palpable music from your speakers. I think this is WAY cool and for me is what separates the analog men from the digital proprietary boys. It's physics in service of music that has inspired people to seek ever more creative avenues of progressing this methodology. There are cartridges with magnets hand wound from miniscule strands of exotic metal alloys and housed in wood, ceramic, metal and even Bakelite. Works of art, museum pieces! Yikes! If anyone would like to chime in with more granular detail on this brutal signal transfer process please do! We should be grateful for all of the amazingly talented people whose labors bring us closer to the music we love.