The formidable Lisitsa, faster with a soundbite than Obama at an oil slick, declares: "Digital did to music what Photoshop did to photography." She has a point, but you see where this is leading: to a perception that new technology is the enemy of musical truth.

The danger here is that the classical community, itself a tiny fragment of the global music market, will split into camps of mutual incomprehension. The hungriest consumers for classical music are now in East Asia, chiefly Korea and China, where most purchases are by download. While a growing minority of Westerners wistfully embrace the dead LP, Asian ears are being iTuned to an opacity of sound that music professionals consider meagre, offensive and unacceptable. 

At this point, the vinyl revival ceases to be a trivial matter. It amounts to a Tower of Babel moment when one half of the world can no longer understand the other and music cannot bridge the gap. It is all very well for aesthetes with high-end music systems to welcome the return of flat-pack LPs, but their satisfaction distracts from the chief priority. 

The winner of the 2012 orchestral Grammy was a download-only Los Angeles concert of Brahms's Fourth. It sounded terrible. Unless Apple and its rivals can be pressured to produce a credible sonic image of rich orchestral sound, our ears will be progressively impoverished and the next generation will be raised in ignorance of what real music might be. At that point, even a rational column like this might revert to 33 revolutions per minute.