arny krueger

No, they are still both in play. Two different processes that happen during playing.

There's plenty of evidence that this happens, due to the incredibly tiny
contact point(s) between the stylus and the surface of the LP.

Do you have any experience with this sort of thing? Are you moving a point
that is as small as the contact area of a stylus over the surfaces you work
on? You are a makeup artist, if I recall correctly.

The whole point (pun not intended) is that the contact is over one or two very small areas.

That's because it doesn't happen that way. The heating is *very* localized.

The process that some of us are familiar with (perhaps not many from
southern California) relates to ice skating. The blade on skates is far
larger than a phono stylus, but it still heats the water enough due to
pressure, that the ice is melted where the blade contacts the ice. That's
one reason why skates slide across ice with such low resistance.

And BTW, ice skates don't warm up appreciably when this happens. For one
thing, the ice, like the vinyl LP, carries away a lot of the microscopic
amounts of heat that are involved.

Again, they are very large compared to the size of the area that is involved.

I doubt that critics of this process have any epxerience with other similar
processes in real life.