The Verdicts: First, the Panasonic SL-850 turntable: This turntable uses the first version of quadraphonic sound, CD-4, which means the turntable outputs four distinct, individual channels directly to 4 separate speakers. Though it's a form of surround sound, in my test track, "Musicione" by The Guess Who, the differences between stereo and quadraphonic weren't quite as obvious as, say, between stereo and a 5.1 surround sound mix. There's very little of that gimmicky "moving sound" that flits between each channel that's sometimes emphasized in 5.1, but there's definitely a noticeable difference between quad and stereo.

In the chorus of the quad version of "Musicione," each background vocal track gets its own channel, which is reduced to a mere two-way split in the sad stereo mix. Also in quad, there's a treble/bass split between the front and rear, even going so far as to split the drum set components (high hat and snare in the front, floor tom and bass drum in the rear), while the left/right split is saved for the band's two main instruments (piano left, guitar right). It's pretty subtle, and no doubt some of the subtlety was exacerbated by the questionable quality of my speakers, but a stereo version of the same song definitely felt flat in comparison.

The turntable also features an automatic start and stop, a welcome addition, as well as the standard 33/45/78 RPM modes. It's the only automatic turntable I've ever used—instead of lifting the needle and placing it on the record (crazy! I'll go to the gym if I'm gonna work out, you know what I mean?), you just flip a switch and the Panasonic does it for you. My particular model is missing the center pin that holds the record in place—in the past, I've filed down a wood pencil as a replacement, though the drill bit I found amongst my dad's tools (pictured) works nicely as well.

The downsides to quadraphonic? The needle, technically called the "Shibata stylus," is a specialized type. When the time comes for replacement, you can bet it'll cost more and be harder to find than a standard needle. Plus, there are comparatively few quadraphonic records out there—my dad's copy of The Who's Quadrophenia was actually only in two channel. While the SL-850 plays stereo like a champ, you're not buying it for mere two-channel audio.

The GE 4-Channel Receiver is an even more interesting beast. Its most striking feature is the built-in 8-track cassette player, though to my deep, deep disappointment, it refused to play the only two 8-tracks in my possession, a Motown compilation and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. No amount of NES-style blowing into the cassettes or the player would yield any sound, so I suppose it must be busted.

But the receiver itself is a powerhouse—it's got both four-channel and simple stereo modes, a stylish AM/FM tuner, and a sweet balance joystick that lets you control which of the four channels (L/R front and back) gets the most emphasis. It was able to push my four speakers (a pair of giant Pioneer cabinets and a pair of slightly smaller Sonys, one of which was mysteriously and unsettlingly sticky) with a ton of power and pretty decent bass/treble control, thanks to a pair of sliders. Unfortunately, it's packing only a single audio input, so it might require an external A/V switcher if I wanted to line in more than just the turntable.

The GE unit is also a handsome-looking deck, with wood paneling all around accompanied by a chrome and black plastic front. The AM/FM tuner lights up in fluorescent green and has this great squiggly grid design, and it's very clear what every toggle and switch does. If it weren't for the busted 8-track deck, it'd be a winner.

Turntable:
Quadraphonic audio recordings sound great

Plays stereo and quad perfectly

Automatic start/stop is a welcome feature

Rare needle could be expensive and/or difficult to replace

Not the best-looking turntable we've ever seen

Receiver:
Powerful, customizable sound (joystick especially is great)

Stylish design

Single input necessitates external A/V switcher

8-track player doesn't work

Heavy as hell

Special thanks to my dad for hoarding all this ancient gear in our basement.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

We're not sure how the music would be outputted—would there be a transmitter in the red sphere? It's probably not worth worrying about that kind of minor issue as we're pretty sure the entire idea is impossible, but it's also creative and great to look at, and would almost certainly blow your parents' minds. [Design Boom]

Artsick's kit comes with a hands-only clock mechanism and a series of decals that you can use to set up your wall in any way you see fit. Naturally, it also allows you to customize the look on a whim. It's like a functional, design-oriented magnetic poetry for the new millennium. [Artsick via Unplggd]

The reason: Vinyl albums' sales are growing. As much as 15 percent up in 2007 and a whooping 89% more in 2008. The 2009 forecast is better. The numbers are so good that Best Buy started a pilot program in 100 stores. The results were so good that the third largest music seller after iTunes and Wal-Mart is thinking about using as much as eight square feet in each of its 1,020 stores to sell vinyl records.

While sales of vinyl discs are not as big as CDs, the latter numbers have dropped 20%. Apparently, vinyl are becoming a cult object, with an audience seeking the appeal of the physical format and the special sound of analog (which in the case of the classics, could be more attractive than the digital productions). The interest, although minimal considering the rest of the industry, is big enough that big labels are re-releasing old records in vinyl. One example: In September 2008 EMI started to a new line called "From the Capitol Vaults," which included The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," Jimi Hendrix's "Band of Gypsies," and Radiohead's "OK Computer." [New York Post]

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn't record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

Fremer, if you have yet to decipher this, is an audiophile of the highest calibre. Literally millions of dollars of premium audio equipment have passed through his listening room under review for Stereophile magazine, and he's been obsessing about vinyl since he was four years old, memorizing the labels of his parents' 78s. A man who, when digital recording and reproduction methods began to surface culminating in the compact disc's takeover as the predominant music format, became a figurehead for the vinyl superiority movement, staunchly advocating its greater tonal resolution over a CD's 44.1 kHz max. (See this MTV clip for Fremer in action, circa 1993.)

In short, a species of human I had never known prior to hanging out with him in his New Jersey basement listening room last week, and a species, frankly, I was skeptical of in just about every possible way.

Upon getting picked up by Fremer at the train station near his home, my fears immediately began to feel all too real. It was but a minute or two into our car ride from the station that a rant on Walt Mossberg's inferior review of the Airport Express, Apple's music-streaming mini-router that Fremer and I both enjoy in our home systems, begins in earnest:

"If he's not going to tell people how it sounds, then what's the fucking point? Don't step into my world, Walt!" Multiple emails of complaint to poor Walt are cited. I am definitely thinking "uh oh" at this point.

But then, settled into the lone leather chaise in Fremer's basement audio temple, nestled right in the sweetspot of his $65,000 Wilson MAXX3 speakers, I hear the needle drop on Air's "Run" from Talkie Walkie. It's a song I've never heard (kind of fell off Air after overusing Moon Safari considerably), but one that I'm now listening to all the time. Because, with all honesty, I have never heard anything like that song played on that stereo system at that moment. Ever.

The song ends, and after emerging from an opiate-like haze, I hear a hiss. And yes, while the record was playing, I heard a pop, a crackle or two. Isn't this as high-end an audiophile system as they come? Shouldn't the sound be of such purity so as to sustain life in lieu of water for days on end?

I mention this slight—very slight, but noticeable—hiss to Fremer, and it's probably a frequency that 50 plus years of rocking have eliminated from his spectrum. He doesn't even care. This is when I start to understand.

After hearing I'm a Bowie fan, Fremer drops into his near limitless stacks and spins a pressing of "Heroes" with part of the title track's chorus in German. I'm giggling with pleasure at the frankly obscene level of detail I hear (Ich! Ich werde König!), but of course, I'm hearing the pops and crackles that a 30+ year-old record is likely to have. Shouldn't a $350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?

"It's like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughing—same thing," Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

We play my solid 256kbps VBR MP3 of "Heroes" off my iPod; it sounds like shit. Free of pops and crackles, yes, but completely lifeless, flat in every way. This is the detail that matters: Audiophiles are basically synesthesiacs. They "see" music in three-dimensional visual space. You close your eyes in Fremer's chair, and you can perceive a detailed 3D matrix of sound, with each element occupying its own special space in the air. It's crazy and I've never experienced anything like it.

It is within this 3D space where the audiophile lives and operates, and spends all his money. Fremer himself is the first to admit that it would only take $3,000 to $5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans. On a scale of 1 to 100 completely of my own devising, let's put this system at around 85. Now, imagine that you've tasted 85, and you want to go higher; you want Bowie's cries of kissing by the wall to inhabit the most perfect point in your system's matrix, and Bryan Ferry's back-up fly girls on "Avalon" to flank him just beautifully. That, friends, is where you might end up paying hundreds of thousands.

Our little scale, unfortunately, is logarithmic, in that going from zero to 85 doesn't take a lot of effort or money, but going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000 one becomes a justifiable end. We did exactly that, and I strained to hear any difference at all (more impressions of our test will follow later in the week), but to Fremer, the difference was abundantly clear—not necessarily better with the more expensive cable, but different, a warmer, fuller sound, as Fremer described it. Here's the breakdown of his current listening-room hardware:

The point is, people like Fremer can not only hear the difference, they crave it. I walked into his listening room expecting to discern absolutely zero difference in the comparison tests we had planned, swapping out speaker cables that cost as much as a meal at the best restaurant in New York for another set that cost as much as a year of undergrad at Harvard. I actually did hear a tiny difference. But to people like Fremer, that tiny difference becomes a mind-boggling disparity, and it's worth paying for if it means a few decimal points closer to perfection. Unfortunately, the logarithmic curve is asymptotic: There is no ceiling. Fremer will be the first to admit that this type of dragon chasing is not and should not be for everyone.

This obsession with tiny differences explains Fremer's fevered defense of analog music sources over digital. Two anecdotes from the past are particularly illuminative:

The first is his memories of rushing to the record store in 1979 to pick up Ry Cooder's Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first mainstream rock release to be recorded using an all-digital process, which at the time was being lauded as the next big thing. But upon getting it home and dropping it into his high-end system, the results were not good:

"It made me feel horrible!" he remembers. Even though it was played on vinyl, Fremer could already detect some missing elements in the 3D audiophile space that just weren't there. "And it's not like I was a digiphobe at this point—I had no reason to be. I was as excited as anyone to hear this."

The second was the first public playing of a compact disc, to a room full of expectant audiophiles a few years later. While they breathlessly applauded the first track played from the then refrigerator-sized device, Fremer was horrified. He heard the same flatness and lack of detail in the 3D audio world he loved to inhabit. "I felt…weird. My hands were shaking. All I could think, then, was WE'RE FUCKED!" A few days later, a new, custom-printed bumper sticker was slapped on Fremer's car: "COMPACT DISCS SUCK."

And thus began a long battle, and thankfully, it seems to have ended happily. Both with the advent of SACDs—which Fremer is a great fan of, proving that he's not hung up on nostalgia—and the greater acceptance and continued life of vinyl, Fremer is a happy man these days. "I'm on top of the world right now. I set out to save vinyl, and we did it."

Because the thing is, Fremer loves music first and foremost. The audiophile I had feared was one who cares far more about the overpriced gadgetry than the actual music. This is not who I ended up meeting. This man listens to music and makes sure it was recorded with the best fidelity, that the intents of the artist have been preserved. And thank God he does, because we certainly don't.

I listen to most of my music on downloaded, compressed, lossy MP3s, and so do you. But even if you can't hear the sound quality, we need someone like Fremer up on that wall, a preservationist of archival recordings and an ombudsman for new recording techniques, because one day you'll want to hear it, and it'll be there because of audiophiles.

These guardians in and outside of the recording industry ensure that, whether it's in a movie theater tomorrow or in your own home listening room on some far off future date, you'll be able always get back to a recording that expresses every frequency, every ounce of warmth and life, of the original performance. Because if you can hear, it, if you ever get to live in that 3D space, you'll be glad Fremer helped defend it.

For more audio goodness, hit up Fremer's own site at musicangle.com

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

Unfortunately, the vinyl was made from the same mix as the CD, so the distortion is still there. However, it is fairly standard practice to make separate masters for separate formats, and Sheperd's analysis reveals that the analog distortion on the vinyl tracks have less clipping (although the difference is minimal) compared to the the CD version. In reality, this is probably a moot point given the fact that a hardcore Metallica fan is far more likely to to dig up GHIII tracks than buy a turntable. However, even the thought of turning to vinyl these days further illustrates the point that record labels need to re-focus their attention back on quality. [Mastering Media Thanks Michael!]

OK, actually it's sculpture by Jean Shin that's on display at the Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design through February 15. [NYT via Apartment Therapy]

Paul's been building his collection for most of his life. He used to run a record store, and while running it he never sold the last copy of any album or single, instead keeping it for his archives. Over the years, those really added up.

Now, at an advancing age, stricken with diabetes and legally blind, Paul wants to sell the collection. It's been appraised at about $50 million, but Paul is asking a mere $3 million. He's had no serious offers, and an eBay auction back in February fell through.

In a time when you can access pretty much whatever music you want online, hard copies of albums are declining in value, both monetary and sentimentally. But to see such a mindblowing collection as this sitting in a basement, unwanted, is really heartbreaking. This is historic, no matter that we live in the iPod era or not, and it belongs in a museum. If only one cared enough to buy it. [World's Greatest Music Collection via Nah Right]

During the two decades that I've had my components, I've run the gamut from vinyl to cassette and CD, and all the way back again. The black boxes are part of my life, they've stoked parties, soaked up miserable tears, impressing and depressing the menfolk in my life. I've sawed antique walnut cabinets to pieces in order to accommodate multi-plugs, connectors and dust covers and now all I rely on is a little white fag-packet-sized box that stores more music than I could ever hope to accumulate.

How many times have you bought the same album? I've got multiple formats for quite a few, but here's a perfect example: I spent a year in France as a teenager and, having just a Walkman and portable speakers for company, bought myself Mlah by Les Negresses Vertes. A couple of years later, when I was deep into the house scene in Paris, and running a music fanzine, I persuaded their record label to give me the 12" of Zobi La Mouche. Nice buggers that they are, they threw in the album on vinyl, too. A few years later, and I went to Madrid for the first time, I found the CD on special offer in a record store and, having only my laptop for company, snapped it up.

Several years—and moves—later, I get my first iPod. Easy peasy, I think, as I sit down with a pile of CDs to rip. Mlah? Meh. According to my laptop, the disc was unreadable. It was time to open up an iTunes account. Sleazy teasy record labels, more like. Call me a fool, but I've acquired Mlah FOUR TIMES OVER. How many more formats can the record companies come up with? Hologram disco MP3s? Dubbly sound that goes to Eleven? Free horse and cart when you purchase the high-quality, 4-swazillion-kbps version? Even the tracks I've ripped may already be obsolete. To quote Johnny Rotten, "Ever get the feeling you've been had?"

It's Thursday afternoon and, as I lie on my bed and type this, one of the movers is transferring my clothes into one of those hanging boxes. I reckon I've got about 20 minutes to decide whether my boxed-up Denon tape deck, Technics amp and turntable, NAD CD player and KEF speakers make into the van marked "Blighty." It is, however, a bit of a no-brainer. How could I abandon those stalwarts of my life, passé though they may be, in favor of a simpler system whose audio quality isn't exactly fabulous?

Perhaps the clincher, though, is that my iPod is currently filed under B for busticated. Into the van my components go, then. Whether they ever come out of their boxes again is another story.

FOR VINYL BUFFS SONY OFFERS TURNTABLE WITH USB OUTPUT FOR CONVERTING RECORDS TO DIGITAL FILES

LAS VEGAS, Feb. 26, 2007 - Providing a clever approach for converting vinyl records to digital files, Sony today unveiled a turntable system with USB output.

The new PS-LX300USB turntable provides fully automatic operation of vinyl playback at 33-1/3 and 45 rpm speeds. It offers a belt drive system for reduced motor noise and rotational stability, in addition to a static balance tone arm with a bonded diamond stylus for precise tracking and low record wear. A supplied moving-magnet phonograph cartridge and built-in phonograph pre-amp allows for compatibility with A/V receivers without a phonograph input.

The turntable is packaged with Sound Forge Audio Studio software for simple professional-quality audio editing and production on a home computer, allowing for MP3 playback on portable music players.

The new turntable will be available next month for about $150 at sonystyle.com and at Sony Style® retail stores nationwide, as well as at military base exchanges and authorized dealers around the country.

This rather snappy matte gray box connects up to regular turntables to convert your vinyl into MP3s, while reducing noise at the same time. Now, before all you analog specialists line up to kick me in the comments, the Declicker will take away the crackle and pop of background noise, but not that smooooth hisssssss that aficionados claim makes vinyl so special.

The Declicker works without a computer, and its makers claim that it is the only gadget on the market that will do this. I like the fact that it's got a Sensitivity knob (I can think of a few guys who might benefit from one of those). Drawbacks? Don't expect it to work its magic on 78s, and its $2500 price tag.

Product Page [ELP via Sci-Fi Tech]

Boombox Hall of Fame [PocketCalculatorShow]