That you - and I too, Altec - can enjoy the sound of vinyl so much, often more than CD for many people, even those who've grown up on CD sound, in spite of the superiority of CD specifications, makes me doubt that the "simplicity" of phono preamp circuits is the whole story. If it were, wouldn't all competently made phono preamps, or preamp sections, sound pretty much the same? But is that really true? I wonder if anybody reading this has actually heard different phono preamps, fed by the same record players and pickups and feeding the same front ends, amplifiers, and speakers. Not an easy test to arrange, and there couldn't be instant A-B comparisons. But how interesting it would be, at least to those of us really interested in music and sound quality.