Apologies to the OP, by the way. My $.02? Big diference between plug and play and tweak/diy/hunt/no dealer support. If you like the latter sort of thing, there are lots of options, but it's a big commitment and involves at least as much obsession and fiddling as listening to music. If that's your bag, go for it. Otherwise, get a Rega P3, get it set up with care by someone who knows what they are doing, and then start tapping your toes, 'cause vinyl sounds great.
Johnxxxx,
I have no doubt your Lenco sounds great. I absolutely agree that blind A/B comparison, done with care and patience, is the most probative way, though hardly foolproof, to decide what one is likely to prefer as a purchase for long term listening.
How did I miss your point? Was it just that the experts may be wrong? Duh. Did I say anything to the contrary?
Your comparison of yourself as an idler wheel crank to Galileo as a heliocentrist crank and Darwin as an evolutionist crank are absurd and ridiculously pretentious. Yeah right, idler wheel vs. direct drive vs. belt drive is a matter of revolutionary science, and you are a revolutionary scientist.
Moreover:
"empirical science, rests on experiment and observation" is not a definition (any logician could tell you that). Looking out the window to see whether it's raining or not is based on experience and it ain't empirical science.
Your Bacon quotation is pretty, and back in the day, it was important in the effort to overthrough scholastic appeal to authority as the gold standard in all matters of inquiry, but its idea of neutral collection of observational evidence was shallow, and hasn't been taken seriouly, except as a target of criticism, by theorists of science for a very long time. Obervation itself is theory laden -- that's the term of art in science studies -- so no observation is a pure foundation for theory.
The Galileo case illustrated the point perfectly. He didn't prove the Earth revolved around the sun. he showed how how one interprets various 'pure observations" will depend upon one's presuppositions, and that various bits of evidence cited by geocentrists against heliocentrism depended for their evidential force on question-begging assumptions involving the stationary character of the Earth. When it comes to "proving" the Earth does move, you need not just observations, but theory as well, and the former can never itself prove the latter. This point can be made as a matter of logic, by the way, which I dare say I understand better than you. If you knew any logic or actual theory or history of science, you wouldn't be so dogmatic in the absolute value of your "observations". And you'd realize that your own conviction that the Earth revolves around the sun isn't based on observation, but on appeal authority -- which is as it must be in most things. Knowing which authorities to trust is an essential epistemological skill, not reducible to some rule, and certainly not a matter of pure observation.
Oh, and yeah, some equipment sounds better than others. Duh. Your jumping up and down and screaming that the sky is falling doesn't make it so, however.
