It seems reasonable to think that bike manufacturers who accommodate this trend should have a better chance of surviving. Indeed, the Russian manufacturer of Ural motorcycles has worked to focus consumer attention on their all-sidecar line (and their increasingly popular vintage styling); consequently, they've gone from the red to the black. Harley-Davidson, on the other hand, stopped making sidecars three years ago, in apparent ignorance of the fact that the median age of their own customers is 49 and rising. (Their ship remains afloat—to the great relief of their dedicated workforce—only because H-D now makes more money from the licensing of their logo than from the products they manufacture.)

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

At least partly in response to steadily rising sales of LPs, a number of domestic audio manufacturers continue to create new turntables, tonearms, phono cartridges, and phono preamplifiers for audio perfectionists. Those are the clever ones: the ones who want to be healthy, not Harley.

Sure, the prevalence of grotesquely unaffordable ego-wank products among that lot remains the dominant trend within the trend, and a contributing factor to our industry's sad slide toward irrelevance. But there's cause for optimism whenever someone introduces a record player that's affordable (footnote 1) or at least relatively so. Thus my pleasure at seeing the smart new Paris turntable from Oracle Audio Technologies, the Canadian firm that earned a place in audio history with their very first product: the striking and similarly smart Delphi turntable (footnote 2).

The Oracle Paris Mk.V is offered in a number of configurations: with and without various tonearm choices, with and without Oracle's own cartridge, with and without a dustcover, and so forth. As a turntable only, minus tonearm and cartridge and everything else, the Paris sells for $3150. Oracle recently sent me a fully lit Paris, with its fluid-damped carbon-fiber tonearm and its high-output moving-coil cartridge, all for the less-than-extortionate sum of $5000.

Is "UFO mothership over London" video real?
When I first saw the Oracle Paris, at the 2011 Salon Son et Image show in Montreal, I assumed it was a solid-plinth design—either that, or a design in the spirit of the first Roksan Xerxes, whereby the arm-mount area is defined by a slot routed into an otherwise solid board. As it turns out, the Paris's platter and tonearm are completely and, I think, cleverly isolated from the rest of the works. The subchassis, for want of a better term, is a 1"-thick wooden plank a little over 1' long, oriented in a straight line between the platter bearing and tonearm mount fastened to it. Two stiffly flexible fiber-glass rods pass through the subchassis and extend, laterally, into the plinth itself, with soft Sorbothane washers at all contact points. At the very ends of the suspension rods, those rubber washers are encased by hard plastic tubes, movable up or down by means of threaded rods that are accessed from underneath the turntable. Thus the user can raise, lower, and level the platter and tonearm relative to the motor and plinth.

The Paris's alloy main platter bearing combines a low-viscosity oil bath with a polished steel spindle, the latter machined to a point much like that of the Linn LP12, but notably smaller in diameter. Also like the Linn's, the Oracle's bearing is fitted with high-tech polymer sleeves, and is used without a thrust ball. The spindle is press-fitted to a machined alloy subplatter, the rim of which is 0.375" tall: not a whole lot more than the width of the flat drive belt itself. The AC synchronous drive motor is mounted 4" away from the platter bearing, fastened to an alloy cradle on the underside of the plinth and damped with a soft polymer ring. The convex running surface of the brass motor pulley is even narrower than the rim of the subplatter—hence the importance of being able to line up the plinth with the subchassis. The transformer for the Paris's 24V power supply is contained in a wall wart—a decent one, with a rugged connector and a cable that's slightly less wispy than the norm—while the phasing circuit, regulators, and other electronic components are housed in the plinth itself.

The dark acrylic platter measures just under 1" thick, and its outermost edge is grooved in a manner that suggests circumference drive by a long belt of round cross-section—although that's not the case. The platter's surface is machined flat, intended for intimate record contact facilitated by a two-piece Delrin clamp that threads onto the top of the spindle. (The use of a separate record mat is not encouraged, and none is supplied.)

If the Oracle Paris is any indication, turntables may themselves be going from black to red: My sample matched perfectly the scarlet box in which Ortofon still packages their old-style SPU pickup heads. Go ahead and reach for one of yours, and see if you don't agree.

Florida couple shares home with 15 skunks
The new Oracle tonearm, available separately for $950, begins life as a Pro-Ject 9cc: an interesting arm in its own right. The stock Pro-Ject arm comes with a set of ABEC7-spec (that's good) ball bearings, a decoupled and calibrated counterweight, and a cartridge platform that's perfectly centered with the arm-bearing axis, notwithstanding the requisite offset angle. But the arm's real calling card is its one-piece tapered armtube of carbon fiber, a material said to confer rigidity and low resonant behavior while allowing the effective mass to remain low enough for use with medium- and high-compliance cartridges. Indeed, the specified effective mass of the Pro-Ject 9cc is 25% lower than that of the ubiquitous Rega RB300 family of arms—yet its armtube appears every bit as rigid and imperturbable.

Oracle adds to this an accessory they call their Micro Vibration Silicone Damping Device: essentially, the same kind of trough-and-paddle affair that Max Townshend crafted for his Rock turntables of the 1980s, albeit one in which the trough doesn't extend over the record itself, and wherein the role of the paddle—which moves with the armtube as the cartridge traverses from the outer groove to the inner—is played by the tip of an adjustable setscrew. The farther the user lowers the setscrew into the stationary silicone bath, the greater the damping effect. Notably, the portion of Oracle's Damping Device that carries the paddle/setscrew is a two-piece clamp, made of Delrin, fastened to the fat end of the armtube; it seems reasonable to wonder if this also confers a damping effect to the carbon-fiber tube.

Other arm details: Cueing is accomplished with a lift/lower device of the usual sort; antiskating force is provided by a thread and falling weight; and cartridge azimuth can be adjusted by rotating the entire armtube, which is otherwise locked in place with a setscrew near the arm bearings.

In terms of setup difficulty, the Oracle Paris proved slightly more daunting than a Rega P1, but still within the capabilities of most audio hobbyists. Two small wooden blocks hold the suspension still during shipping, and those have to be removed and set to one side—after which the user installs the bearing oil, bearing spindle (with subplatter), drive belt, and platter. Then the subchassis is adjusted from underneath by turning four small, knurled knobs that are fairly easy to get at. The idea there is to level the subchassis by adjusting the gap between platter and plinth with a small plastic gauge (provided), after which the turntable as a whole can be leveled absolutely by adjusting its three threaded Delrin feet. The motor requires no special attention, apart from plugging the wall wart into an AC outlet and connecting its five-conductor plug to a socket on the rear edge of the plinth.

The Oracle arm, which arrived premounted on the Paris's subchassis, is a bit trickier, if only because of that damping device. Its calibrated counterweight is surprisingly accurate: After leveling the arm and setting its counterweight to 1.6gm, I was rewarded with a measured downforce of about 1.65gm. Not bad!

Footnote 2: Oracle Audio Technologies, 6136 Blvd. Bertrand Fabi, Suite 101, Sherbrooke, Quebec J1N 2P3, Canada. Tel: (819) 864-0480. Fax: (819) 864-9641. Web: www.oracle-audio.com.

More to the point, and with two notable exceptions—an American manufacturer, now deceased, who boasted that he had either designed or "discovered" all of the world's great loudspeakers, and a Scottish company well known for dividing all competing products between those that are "shite" and those that merely "lack merit"—I don't recall any equipment suppliers from our industry's salad days who tried to enhance my opinion of their gear simply by insulting everyone else's.

As Mick Jagger has sagely observed, things are different today. Now I don't get complaints only when I give a bad or mixed review: I get complaints when I give a good review, said complaints coming not from the reviewee but from his competitors.

In a related story, America's park rangers and amateur videographers report a near-epidemic of wild animals getting their heads stuck in carelessly discarded food containers. In one such instance, a six-month-old black bear cub in Florida scarcely avoided death when a glass jar was removed from his head, after being stuck there for nearly two weeks. Employees of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who saved the cub, named him Jarhead, for all the obvious reasons.

Are we living in middle times?
In high-end audio as in Jellystone Park, the problem is obvious: Shrinking habitats make for dwindling food supplies. Dwindling food supplies make for erratic behavior. Erratic behavior means you should stay in the car and wait for help to arrive.

The locking of horns among equipment suppliers isn't a terrible thing in and of itself, but it can lead to unpleasant complications. Left unchecked, rutting designers will battle not only for food, but for the attention of potential mates, on whom they depend for the survival of their genetic information. Even that wouldn't be such a problem, except that the mates they seek are audio reviewers, and it appears we are always in estrus. Ouch.

Thus we come to the ages-old problem: As in virtually every other field of commercial endeavor, a good review can and often does enhance a manufacturer's shot at success. Whether or not it's my job to promote the financial health of our industry's most visible participants—and I believe it is not—this sort of thing happens all the damn time. Some critics—you know who they are—relish their roles as "kingmakers"; others of us are simply trying to write well, and to pass along whatever it is we learn from year to year, and to entertain by playing the artist's game of encouraging the audience to change its point of view from time to time. The job has its rewards, even if the things we set out to do and the things at which we enjoy our greatest success have nothing to do with one another. Harry Smith and Christopher Columbus would have understood.

So here's the thing: When I meet an equipment supplier who begins and ends his promotional efforts by sliming and slamming and slandering his competitors, and by telling me that everything else is garbage compared to his stuff—the implication, of course, being that nothing I've praised even remotely deserved the honor—I automatically assume that he can't find anything constructive or enlightening to say about his own products. Which is a shame. And while I seldom object when someone wants to spout off in that manner—my family and friends and I probably have more fun laughing at their tirades and letters and can-headed antics than they did creating them—I must also say that, in the long run, they harm only their own cause. It will remain my professional duty to pretend that their behavior is not offensive, and to treat their products as fairly as I treat everyone else's. But, that done, I sure as hell won't go out of my way to give them more than a passing glance in The Future.

Good things can be cheap and cheap things can be good, but stupid clichés are always stupid
And make no mistake: Perfectionist audio does have a future. Stephen Mejias's column, "The Entry Level," is evidence of that. So, too, is the success of such companies as Peachtree Audio, High Resolution Technologies, and Direct Acoustics. (This former owner of a pair of EPI 100 loudspeakers was delighted when John Marks devoted his June column to the latest creation from that classic's inventor, Winslow Burhoe.) One can easily find perfectionist-quality electronics, loudspeakers, and source components that are priced to fit the budgets of students, newcomers to the workforce, and even professional audio reviewers themselves.

There is, however, one glaring absence: Where are all the really affordable cables?

Stephen has uncovered a few, including England's Giant-Killers (no, it's not a Slade tribute band) and some interesting choices from AudioQuest. But the problem, if one wishes to think of it as such, is that manufacturers who get their start as makers of budget gear are often lured into more expensive waters by the higher profits available there—not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's a shame when the affordable side of their product line gets left behind entirely, as happens from time to time.

Yet sometimes the cheap things aren't so much left behind as lost in the fray. So it goes with two products that may be familiar to Stereophile's longtime readers: Kimber Kable's erstwhile entry-level interconnect, the PBJ, and the affordable speaker cable with which Nordost got its start, the Flatline. I've had experience with both, but in the case of the Kimber it had been far too long. So I decided to reacquaint myself with these humble friends.

Luckily for me, versions of both models remain in the lines of their respective makers. But when I called the nice folks at Kimber Kable—no empty platitude in their case, I assure you—I learned that they now have an even cheaper interconnect: the Tonik, which sells for just $80 per 1m pair, terminated with RCA plugs.

Given that PBJ does, indeed, stand for peanut butter and jelly, I guessed that Tonik is meant to connote the poor man's version of a G&T, in which the quenching of thirst takes priority over the banishing of imagined voices. As it turns out, the name is meant to combine humility with verity: While Kimber's more expensive interconnects are proposed to deliver all the timbral color there is to hear, the Tonik aims, instead, at getting the musical fundamentals right.

Very right, it turned out. This simple product, in which three stranded copper wires are neatly braided together (think: friendship bracelets) in a presumably noise-canceling pattern, was musically and sonically fine when I tried it with my reference gear—a system that one might assume has evolved beyond the capabilities of such plebeian wire.

"I spent a half-hour digging in the garden for worms, but couldn't find any."

"You could have driven to Mr. Zetterstrum's farm, knocked on his door, asked his permission, and spent a few hours overturning the cowflops in his pasture. I'm sure you would have found one or two worms that way."

"You're right. I guess I didn't want to go fishing that badly."

So it goes today, as I take my first, tentative look at the world of direct-drive turntables. Like virtually everything else in domestic audio, this little tributary has a history—and a following. I'm respectful of both, but not to the point of adulation; letters of complaint, the likes of which followed my adventures in The Land of the (Advent) Large—eg, "You should have consulted ServoMan1949, DirectDick, and LardVader before writing this column!"—will be discarded unread.

Now then . . .

Direct driving
Generally speaking, one needs a transmission of some sort in order to mate the qualities of an engine with the requirements of its application. The mismatch between an automobile's need for torque at low speeds and a gasoline engine's abundance of same at only higher speeds is the classic example, and the overlapping worlds of record players and electric motors provide another: Electric motors have been with us for a while, but not so the ability to use them at the slow and steady speeds required for record playback. Thus, from the early part of the last century to the late 1960s, the audio industry crept from noisy gearboxes to clunky idler wheels to torque-sapping belts and pulleys . . .

The idea of motorizing a platter directly had long appealed to professional users, for whom quick starts were and are an obvious boon. And while the sonic advantages of sudden acceleration appear not to exist in this life, the performance advantages of the high torque required to move a heavy platter from 0 to 33.33rpm in less than one turn are considerable. In that sense, it would seem that the audiophile stood to gain as much as the DJ from a player in which record spindle and motor spindle are one and the same.

The thing was finally done in 1969, when the Technics division of Panasonic introduced their SP-10, considered by many to be the first commercial direct-drive turntable of the modern hi-fi era (footnote 1). Like the Garrard 301 and the Thorens TD 124 before it, the SP-10 was a plinthless, armless, and altogether serious piece of gear. Unlike those other landmark products, the Technics SP-10 incorporated a servo.

The word sounds inscrutable, but like other such hi-fi terms—jitter and baffle come to mind—the thing itself is straightforward: A servo is, quite simply, any secondary mechanism that's used to correct and control the performance of a primary mechanism. Servos can be mechanical or electrical in nature, or virtually any combination thereof, and can respond to a variety of error inputs. The mule driver who whips his mount at the first sign of slowing is a biomechanical servo (implying, correctly, that the former is slave to the latter: a comforting thought for mules everywhere). The tachometer-based system used to correct and control platter speed in the first SP-10 is an electronic servo. And so it goes.

As so often happens, more than one manufacturer was busy developing the same thing at the same time. Thus, it wasn't long before a direct-drive turntable was brought to market by a different firm: Nippon Denki Onkyo Kabushikigaisha, otherwise known as Den-On—or, simpler still, Denon. Early in 1970, Denon completed work on a high-torque AC motor made specifically for low-speed use, then designed for it a speed-control system in which magnetic markers on the platter's perimeter were read by a stationary tape head: their patented Pulse Magnetic Field Detection system. Denon's first direct-drive turntable was released to the broadcast industry later that year; their first domestic unit followed in 1971.

In the years after, Denon designed and manufactured scads of other direct-drive turntable models. Throughout the 1980s the company added to their line a number of relatively affordable models with integral tonearms, but before that, Denon's domestic players were typified by the DP-2000 and DP-80: high-quality motor units available without tonearm or plinth, if the customer so desired. (Interestingly, a spring-loaded isolation base for Denon's top-end models was among the very first products made by the contemporary American turntable company VPI.) Denon's professional models reached their pinnacle with the self-standing DP-100M, the motor of which was taken from the company's line of disc-cutting lathes. (The 100M went on to influence the development of another iconic player, the professional-grade EMT 950 of 1976 . . . but that's another story for another day.)

Throughout that time, Denon did more than just crank out turntables. Given their long association with the Japan Broadcasting Company (NHK), most of Denon's landmark products have been made for the professional audio field: Japan's first disc-cutting lathes (1939), the world's first practical pro-audio PCM recorder (1972), and—lest we forget—the world's first pro-audio CD player (1981). Of course, we all know what happened to turntable sales after the first consumer CD players came into existence—and Denon's case was no exception. It seemed there would be no more DP-80s from the now-sizable company, let alone DP-100Ms. And while Denon never altogether ceased making turntables, that segment of their product line took a back seat, with a far greater emphasis on cheap record players than ever before in the company's history.

Forever changes
Like the people we love, the companies that supply our audio gear sometimes change into things we no longer recognize. The loudspeakers designed and manufactured by Snell Acoustics have little in common with the ones they made in their early years, when founder Peter Snell was still alive. The audio consumers of 1983 who bought Conrad-Johnson Design's PV3 preamp for just $399 ($299 in kit form!) have to look elsewhere for such a thing in 2011. Today, Linn makes more digital products than analog, Naim no longer makes tonearms, and the majority of goods manufactured by Revolver are loudspeakers.

Some companies remain more or less as they were. Kimber Kable still manufactures their classic PBJ interconnects. Quicksilver Audio never stopped making small, high-quality tube amplifiers. Magnepan still sells Magneplanars, which are still among the highest-value speakers in high-end audio.

And sometimes they come back—like Denon, which at one time virtually owned the domestic market for high-end direct-drive turntables. For most of the past five years, Denon's US turntable line topped out at $329, with a strong emphasis on USB-ready models designed less for enjoying music than for archiving it. But in 2010, in recognition of their 100th anniversary, the Japanese firm introduced a new analog product that claims the same perfectionist heritage as its first direct-drive models: the DP-A100, in which turntable, plinth, tonearm, and cartridge are sold as one for $2499 (footnote 2).

Footnote 2: Denon Electronics (USA) LLC, D&M Holdings, 100 Corporate Drive, Mahwah, NJ 07430-2041. Tel: (201) 762-6500. Fax: (201) 762-6670. Web: usa.denon.com.

My guest, an occasionally nice person, didn't mean her question in a nice way. It was pointed and derisive: a needle intended to burst whatever it was that made me think filling a room with thousands of LPs was a good idea. She didn't wait for an answer—it would have been "Not quite"—but I half think she half expected me to see reason on the spot.

That would have been unlikely. And the fact that she was technically right, if rude, doesn't matter: Virtually all of us are collectors, because our crazy minds are sick with the inability to enjoy each passing pleasure as just that, and not as something we feel we must be able to revisit at will. I have seen an Honus Wagner baseball card. (Remember, I live 20 minutes from Cooperstown, New York.) It was cool. Should I wish to own it, so I can take it out and see it again and again? Some say yes, some say no, and neither answer is righter than the other.

I bought another amplifier this year: a Fi 421A ($3950), which replaces the Fi 2A3 Stereo amp that I used to own. That brings the total number of hi-fi amplifiers I own back up to three. (I'm counting a pair of monoblocks as one). Unless I'm going for some sort of Charles Ives effect—an idea that isn't completely lacking in appeal, now that I think about it—I can't listen to more than one stereo amp or stereo pair at the same time. But I do enjoy all of them.

I'm not sure I can explain this thing about amplifiers. I could be happy owning, for the rest of my life, just one turntable, one preamplifier, and one pair of speakers. But there are too many amps to ignore, some of which are both good and different: good in the sense that they all get one or more musically crucial things very right, different inasmuch as the goodness of one doesn't entirely overlap the goodness of another. Like the blind men describing the elephant, the amplifiers I own say different things, and all of them are true.

And here we are: After just 412 words, I'm on very thin ice with those who would have us think that two different-sounding components can't both be high-fidelity, because there's only one truth. I'd write [sigh] here if it weren't so unmanly.

Doffing the cap
The Fi 421A amplifier was introduced in 1996, when the manufacturing company was only two or three years old. Before then, owner Don Garber (footnote 1) operated an audio store, also named Fi, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, in Manhattan's Soho district. That incarnation of Fi sold vintage gear that Garber had reconditioned—"Occasionally, someone would drive up with an old McIntosh 275 or Marantz tube amp and ask 50 bucks for it," he told me—and new amplifiers by such designers as Noriyasu Komuro, Herb Reichert, J.C. Morrison, and Wavelength Audio's Gordon Rankin.

Just as important, the Fi store became an informal meeting place for those and other pioneers of the low-power movement (footnote 2). Fi was, for a time, the Algonquin Round Table of the New York audio scene, and Don Garber was its Alexander Woollcott. (So far as I know, it lacked a Dorothy Parker.)

"The idea of making my own amps hadn't occurred to me yet," Garber says today. Nonetheless, while running his store, he designed the chassis and layout for a push-pull monoblock circuit by J.C. Morrison based on the EL34 output tube. "They were very, very good push-pull amps," according to Garber—but by then, he and Morrison were both becoming more interested in single-ended designs. For Garber, the seed had been planted when a friend invited him to come hear a newly acquired pair of vintage Western Electric model 91A amplifiers. To say that he was impressed would be an understatement.

In 1993, Garber took the plunge and built his own single-ended amp, designed around the 2A3 output triode: "I was attracted by the simplicity. The lower the power of an amp, the more I seemed to like it." It was a good move: That first Fi amplifier, the Fi 2A3, sold right out of the store, literally to the first customer who walked in and heard it. "I took out an ad in Sound Practices, and before long I was selling amps all over the country. At that point the store became kind of an albatross, so that was that."

The Fi 2A3—first produced as a stereo amp, then as a monoblock—is elegantly simple: a single-ended-triode (SET) amplifier with a completely tube-rectified power supply, in which all tubes are heated by AC, straight off a secondary winding of the mains transformer. Significantly, Garber's 2A3 is direct-coupled: Rather than using a capacitor to prevent high-voltage DC going from the plate of the driver tube to the signal grid of the output tube, he raises the DC potential of the output tube's signal grid to the same level as the driver tube's plate; raises the potential of the output tube's cathode to whatever level is required for the grid to have the correct negative bias (relative to the cathode); and raises the potential at the output tube's plate, since the actual plate voltage, as seen by the tube, is that which is observed between plate and cathode, not plate and ground.

"It's easy to direct-couple a 2A3 [tube]. It's no more difficult than not doing so," Garber said. His modesty extended to the question of originality: "My amp was not the first direct-coupled 2A3 amp. I've never done anything that someone else hasn't done first!"

From Fi's first days as a manufacturing company, one or another version of Garber's direct-coupled 2A3 amp has been his biggest seller. But soon after that amp began to sell, he had an idea to try something a bit more radical.

Nothing is sacred
When Western Electric developed their 421A dual-triode tube, they intended it as a series regulator. In early 1996, Don Garber adapted it to a higher calling.

Fi wasn't the first company to make an amplifier with a Western Electric 421A for a power tube: Shindo Laboratory offered a 10Wpc push-pull 421A amp in the early 1980s, and the tube has attracted a few DIY enthusiasts since that time. But Fi is surely the first manufacturer to use the 421A in a single-ended, nonparallel, commercial amplifier. And since the Western Electric 421A is a twin tube, that puts the Fi 421A in a class of its own: a stereo amplifier with a single power tube.

Unlike the Fi 2A3, the Fi 421A is capacitor-coupled: "It could be [made direct-coupled], but then the power supply would have to be more complex," Garber said. "It would then have to be a much bigger, ungainly amp. I don't like things that are bigger than they have to be." The Fi 421A weighs a mere 20 pounds, and measures just 10" W by 8" H (including tubes) by 10.5" D. "There is nothing sacred," Garber continued. "I like direct coupling, but not everything has to be that way."

Footnote 2: Art neglected to mention the address, in Manhattan's Soho district, of Garber's original tube-amplifier store: 30 Watts Street.—Robert J. Reina

Ortofon, the Danish firm that's been in business longer than any other manufacturer of phono gear, has confounded all that with the Xpression ($5399): an entirely new moving-coil pickup head designed from the ground up. It has surprised even me.

The Xpression derives from the Ortofon MC A90, a technically advanced moving-coil cartridge that our own Mikey Fremer has called revolutionary. That limited-edition product combined a number of innovations, including a tiny cylindrical field-stabilizing element (FSE), to counteract disturbances the magnetic field; and a wide-range damping (WRD) system, made of tiny rubber and platinum discs, said to enhance both tracking and timbral neutrality. But the A90's real calling card was the manufacturing process used to create its body: selective laser melting (SLM), whereby individual particles of stainless steel are welded together, one layer at a time, to create a complex, homogenous structure in which density and self-damping ability are more than merely random.

Lest you think that SLM is just another initialism cooked up by a manufacturer or its advertising agency, I can assure you that it isn't. This computer-driven manufacturing technique, though still in its infancy, has already gained a foothold in the manufacturing of titanium-alloy orthopedic appliances, where the need for precision and consistency is obvious (footnote 1).

Thus the Ortofon Xpression is a unique blend of the new and the old. Its compliance is on the low side, and the pickup head's 28gm mass is commensurate with that. The recommended downforce is a substantial but not scary 2.6gm. Impedance and output are lowish, at 4 ohms and 0.3 mV, respectively, and the stylus profile is among the most advanced on the market: a highly polished sample of Ortofon's Replicant 100.

This new Ortofon is designed and built as a drop-in replacement for any G-style pickup head. (I measured a collet-to-stylus dimension of precisely 52mm.) It has an SME-standard four-pin connector at one end and an axial finger-lift at the other, both gold-plated. The Xpression looks decidedly equine from some angles, but when viewed directly from its left side it resembles the head and neck of a friendly, googly-eyed Brontosaurus.

Used in either my EMT 997 or Schick tonearm and loaded with my Auditorium 23 step-up transformer, the Xpression proved itself to be much more explicit than my original SPU—more detailed, more open, more tactile, more revealing of nuance and technique—without sounding the least bit hi-fi. The new Ortofon sounded every bit as solid, colorful, dramatic, and forceful as the old one. (I admit, I wouldn't normally have expected such solidity, such lack of fussiness, from a pickup with other than a spherical stylus tip.) The Xpression offered insights at which my Bakelite-bodied SPU has only hinted. The one that stands out in my memory—chiefly because I'm still listening to the record as I write this—is the manner in which drummer Dave Mattacks draws out his more broadly spaced cymbal crashes throughout Fairport Convention's House Full (Hannibal HNBL 1319): difficult to describe, easy to appreciate and enjoy.

Playing Ravel's Ma mère l'oye, with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra (LP, Decca SXL-2062), the Xpression astonished me from the first few measures. Each orchestral swell came across with a degree of force and impact suggested by no other cartridge I've owned: It was almost as if the Ortofon were magnifying the dynamic contrasts within the recording—an effect not unlike that of the Hommage T1 and T2 phono transformers I've written about in past columns. Tonally, the Xpression was more extended in its treble range than my SPU, but not to the point of brightness, nor at the expense of low-frequency richness. The contrabassoon that makes its entrance during the Prelude was just as deep and weighty with the Xpression as with the older SPU—and was better defined in pitch and presence.

The Ortofon Xpression was so outstandingly dynamic and communicative that I began to mistrust my senses: During its first day in my system, did I select, by chance, recordings that just happened to show it off? I stopped that afternoon, and swapped back in my standard Ortofon SPU. The difference was real: Love my older Ortofon though I do, the Xpression was clearly more dramatic, with no penalty in texture or color.

Bear in mind: While the Ortofon Xpression found more and wider dynamic contrasts within otherwise average-sounding records, it did not improve the sound of records that were poor to begin with. (File under: This shirt will not make you fly.) Many selections on Crosby, Stills & Nash's debut album remained dense and woolly. Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's The Reiner Sound still sounded dull. Eno's delightful Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still had a little too much bite in the treble. Sir Colin Davis's recording, with the English Chamber Orchestra, of Mozart's Symphonies 28 and 38 still had a peculiar and hard-to-define congestion and midrange glare. But the Xpression's high-tech stylus profile was as quiet in the groove as anything else I've tried, making it easier than usual for me to enjoy heavily worn samples of otherwise good recordings.

The Xpression confounded more than my expectations regarding new-vs-old technologies (see "As We See It" on p.3): Delighted though I am to see and hear such a product in the second decade of the 21st century, the Xpression brings with it a certain disregard for convention and for the staid logic of commerce—not unlike the best music. That such a technologically advanced company can still take a chance such as this is a blessing.

A Haut with a heart of gold
The products of Shindo Laboratory occupy an uncrowded space in the audio market: not quite mass-produced, not quite bespoke. Virtually all of Ken Shindo's amplifiers and preamplifiers are designed around parts from his extensive collection of vintage tubes, capacitors, resistors, and the like, and of the necessities that remain—especially the distinctive steel casework, made to order for each model—Shindo orders only 10 or 20 at a time. Subsequent production runs are determined by a combination of consumer demand and sufficient reserve supplies of vintage parts.

That approach brings with it the opportunity for Shindo-san to revise every model virtually at will. Those changes can be major or minor—a single-ended amplifier called the Lafon, which has been built with three very different power tubes over the years, is a fine example of the former—and the designer appears to regard them as artistic variations rather than as improvements per se. Just as there are different sonic and musical characteristics to every Shindo amplifier model—many of which would otherwise seem similar, based solely on power output—so there are often distinctions between different samples of the same Shindo model.

I was reminded of that episode a few weeks ago, when a friend called to say he had just finished repairing a client's Marantz Model 8B amplifier: If I wished, and if I promised to be careful, I could borrow it for a day, before it had to go back. Again, I jumped at the chance. Again, the results are less than biblical—although this subject was more agreeable.

I have a reputation, I suppose, for regarding vintage audio gear in a favorable light. I would hope that I'm also known for candor—and candor compels me to say that the 8B, though lovely, was bettered by more than one contemporary amp of my acquaintance. The Marantz sounded colorful and well textured, but no more so than at least a half-dozen modern amps, which also manage to sound more extended and, above all, faster. By comparison, that old 8B sounded . . . well, it sounded just a little bit old.

But I digress . . .

The Marantz Model 8 stereo amplifier made its debut in 1959, not long after the Model 7 preamplifier was introduced, and just one year before the Model 9 monophonic amplifier. Sidney Smith, who designed the 8, the 9, and various other classic Marantz products, eventually departed from numerical order just long enough to revise the Model 8, endowing it with upgraded output transformers of his own design and a sophisticated global feedback system. The resulting amp, the Model 8B, was first offered for sale in 1961 or '62, for the then-considerable sum of $250.

The 8B has two complementary pairs of EL34 power pentode tubes, operated in a class-A/B, Ultralinear output circuit. The amp is a fixed-bias design, and its top panel is adorned with a meter, a rotary selector switch, and four trim pots, all used to facilitate bias adjustments. Each channel has its own 6BH6 pentode, for voltage gain, and 6CG7 dual-triode tube as a phase inverter. The main power supply is rectified by four rugged if not quite immortal silicon diodes, with a selenium rectifier stack for the bias supply. Output power is specified as 35Wpc.

The Marantz 8B uses up to 20dB of global feedback, and it is there that Sidney Smith's design becomes especially interesting. First, the frequency range over which the maximum feedback is applied can be fine-tuned by adjusting a trim cap in each channel's feedback circuit. Second, the feedback signal for each channel is taken not from the secondary tied to the loudspeaker outputs, but from an extra pair of secondary windings that were intended specifically for the job.

In addition to the extra secondary windings, each of the 8B's output transformers has an extra primary; each is isolated from the other and dedicated to a single EL34 tube. With the amplifier's top-panel rotary switch set to Normal, the B+ (ca 435V) is applied equally to those four separate primaries; during bias adjustment, when the switch is used to select among the four individual tubes, the full B+ is applied to just one transformer primary at a time—but this time through the meter and its shunt resistor. (The former reads voltage drop across the latter.) Thanks to Smith's clever transformer design, Marantz could commend the Model 8B for use in either Ultralinear or triode mode, the latter effected with a few minor wiring changes. Given that each output tube had its own primary, there's no reason this amp couldn't also be adapted to single-ended operation, with either one or two output devices per side. But let's not do that today.

A final bit of electronic filigree: Inside the chassis there's also a pair of trim pots for adjusting the symmetry of the waveform produced by the 6CG7 phase-splitter tubes. Like the trim caps for the feedback circuit, those adjustments weren't intended for the casual user. What a mercy!

Appearances aren't always deceiving
As suggested above, the Marantz I borrowed needed a little work. One resistor had to be replaced, as did the four silicon diodes comprising the rectifier for the main supply. On the other hand, not a single one of the original capacitors was in obvious need of replacing—remarkable for a 50-year-old amplifier.

This amp's most grievous flaws were cosmetic, themselves the apparent result of careless storage. (Other Marantz 8Bs of my acquaintance, such as the one owned by the late Edison Price, appeared evergreen.) The EIA codes stamped onto the bias potentiometers indicated that those parts were manufactured in 1964; while hardly conclusive, that suggests that this 8B is from 1964 or 1965.

I hefted the 56-lb Marantz onto my equipment rack and connected it to my usual system, with spade-lug-to-banana adapters between my Auditorium 23 speaker cables and the 8B's rear-mounted terminal strip. Through its normal input jacks (the amp is also equipped with a pair of test inputs, bypassing the sub-20kHz rumble filter), the Model 8B exhibited not a trace of hum, and produced only a small amount of steady-state hiss at idle.

Music sounded pleasantly thick, stringy, and colorful through the 8B. Electric basses in most rock fare, such as "Cinnamon Girl," from Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (LP, Reprise 6349), were sufficiently full but loosey-goosey in the timing department. Imprecise note attacks, more than excessive overhang, were the culprits. A Naim 250 this was not.

Detail and openness were acceptably good, making it easy to tell Young's guitar playing from that of Danny Whitten—a distinction beyond the abilities of lesser antiques. Interestingly, with that Neil Young record and others, the Marantz did something I've come to associate with various products that don't suffer from a lack of character: It had a knack for calling my attention to elements of music that don't always come to the fore. Some instrumental solos faded into the background, while other details—percussion and, especially, backing vocals—came way to the front. The phenomenon may be down to nothing more than minor frequency-response aberrations, so I hesitate to make it down to anything terribly mystical. But still . . . !

By all means, it is the scientist's job to doubt. Yet while science's greatest discoveries also seem to have been precipitated by imagination, the latter quality is apparently no longer in the job description. (Science and chance are also strange bedfellows, but it's only by dint of the latter that we occasionally get visionary men and women of the former.)

Science's credo is to doubt, but journalism's is to keep an open mind—and to report with accuracy, and without an agenda. Unfortunately, for good journalism to have the desired effect, it assumes good reading comprehension at the receiving end. (As with Ohm's Law, power can be developed only across an appropriate load.) I have learned from sad experience that one cannot air controversial topics in the 21st century without at least a dozen imbeciles confusing reportage with tacit agreement. (You may recall the twit who declared, famously and wrongly, that Stereophile"endorsed" the Tice Clock simply because we wrote about the poor thing; had he actually read the piece—assuming, again, a minimum sixth-grade level of reading comprehension—he might have noted that we dismissed the Clock.) Yes, I blame goofy-liberal educators for the decline in the American intellect. Yes, I blame mass-media stultification, too. And, yes, I hope to keep the outrage down to a dull roar this time out.

Here's the thing: Englishman Peter W. Belt makes some of the strangest audio accessories imaginable (footnote 1). I first heard of him in the late 1980s, via the English magazine Hi-Fi Answers, then edited by Keith Howard. There appeared an article about Belt and his accessories, accompanied by a photo of the inventor, apparently with a paper clip attached to his face. That's the sort of thing that leads some people to think, I must learn more about this guy, and others to think, Perhaps there's something good on TV.

The products of P.W.B. Electronics, Ltd., all derive from a discovery that Belt, an electronics engineer, former radio repairman, and England's only manufacturer of electrostatic headphones, made in 1979. A wooden table in his listening room had suffered a spill of some sort, so Belt used a cleaning product—he refers to this as Chemical A—to try to remove the stain. Right after doing so, he and his wife, May, noticed that the sound of their music system was markedly worse than before. They removed the table from the room, upon which the sound improved. Then, out of curiosity as much as anything else, they brought the table back into the room, and the sound worsened again—and so it went, back and forth, until the curious relationship between poor sound and the newly "treated" table was beyond all doubt.

Not long after, the Belts happened on an article in a scientific journal that described a compound given off by a certain species of plant when under stress. That compound was, in fact, their Chemical A—which led Peter Belt to wonder if some negative playback experiences might have less to do with the playback gear than with the reflexive perception of the listener. He further wondered if human beings might be sensitive, in a manner hitherto unexplored, to mixtures of certain chemicals used as danger signals in nature. And, most significant, Peter Belt wondered if he might then be able to identify chemicals that induce not stress but relaxation: happy-face chemicals (other than Scotch, I mean).

Eventually, Belt says, he hit on a compound—call it Chemical B—that seemed to have a consistently positive effect on music listeners. He describes applying this substance to the windows in his room, to the fireplace, even to the dustcover of his turntable, all to surprisingly good effect. At first, according to May Belt, the discovery left Peter feeling miserable rather than elated: The notion of improving sound by refining the listener's perceptions—rather than the design and manufacturing techniques to which he was accustomed, given his engineering background—was disheartening. But as one empirical discovery seemed only to trigger the next, Peter's misery turned to enthusiasm. Before long, Peter and May Belt were in the business of offering products—very unorthodox products, mind you—intended to produce patterns of reassuring energy in their users (other than Scotch-drinkers, I mean).

I'll save for the next issue my own experiences with their techniques and products—the latter exemplified by their signature product, the P.W.B. Cream Electret—but make no mistake: Neither Peter Belt nor May Belt, who has in recent years become the public voice of the family firm, is a charlatan. I say that with utter confidence, for a number of reasons:

• Peter W. Belt (82) and May Belt (77) live humbly in Yorkshire, England. They are not bons vivants or world travelers, although May still speaks with excitement about visiting her best friend in Florida a few years back.

• Peter Belt has a solid background in audio engineering. He understands the engineer's mindset, and has spent much of his career steeling himself for the inevitable ridicule from those circles.

• The ratio of the number of free tweaks openly described by Peter and May Belt (visit www.pwbelectronics.co.uk) to the commercial products offered for sale by P.W.B. Electronics is now something like 30 to 1.

• It's obvious from talking to the Belts for more than three minutes that they are utterly without guile. They believe everything they say, and they appear to harbor an almost bottomless wonder and delight regarding the unmade discoveries that await them.

That last one is key: After buzzing around the topic for several years, and even in light of the occasional jokes I have made at their expense (I hope Peter and May will forgive me, but the whole picture-in-a-freezer thing is irresistible), May Belt agreed to let me interview her during the first week of this year.

"She turned me into a newt"
From leeches to trepanation to fluoroscopes to chemotherapy, the medical arts have their share of products and techniques that were developed to save lives, yet themselves pose considerable risks to the patient—an irony that's accepted by the majority of practitioners and patients alike. Yet in the perfectionist audio community there lives an elderly couple who suggest that the technology of domestic playback equipment may itself have a deleterious affect on our ability to perceive and to understand the subtleties of sound. The latter irony is arguably less extreme than the former, yet its very mention is enough to provoke cries of Burn the witch! from the villagers with the pointiest hats. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Thus I began my conversation with May Belt by asking her to tackle the apparent dichotomy between audio engineering and the study of reflexive perception:

Art Dudley: The first products of yours that crossed my radar were the P.W.B. Electret Foils—which, I believe, were once given away by the magazine Hi-Fi Answers, in little packets attached to the magazine.

May Belt: That's right—attached right to the front cover.

Dudley: Those and other P.W.B. products of that day were intended to affect the gear rather than the perceptions of the listener . . . ?

Belt: No, it has always been perception, from the earliest things that Peter was discovering, which couldn't be associated with affecting the signal.

Dudley: Let's look at that distinction between affecting the gear and affecting one's perception of it: You have observed that, although there is now common agreement that different component parts—say, capacitors—have different sounds, the explanations of those differences offered by the engineering community are probably not correct.

Belt: Right. When human beings don't like or react adversely to, say, capacitors of one sort, and we prefer those of another sort, it's not necessary that those capacitors are affecting the signal. It could be our reaction to their being present in the environment. That's the thing that changes the sound. That's sometimes why you can go to a capacitor that you found was the worst-sounding, and you can cream it with our cream, and that will [then] be the better-sounding—even better than the one that you preferred in the first place.

Dudley: Because of the presence of a chemical . . . ?

Belt: I'm not highly technical, but I understand that there are certain things that we could react to. In a transformer, the signal is coming in to one winding, A+B, goes over the gap, and is inverted in the second winding, to become B+A. It may be that we don't like that. We might not like that, but we don't know that we don't like it. If you then put [in] a second transformer, attach it to that, and you've got this B+A going in to the first winding, and [the signal] is induced into the second winding and becomes A+B . . . we may like that!

But an engineer, coming along and deciding that two transformers working together sounds better . . . well, it might not be the signal: It might be us!

Because those stimuli seldom have much to do with the science of audio playback, products intended to control them don't have much to do with normal audio gear; so it goes in the world of Beltism, where fanciful and often bizarre techniques—ointments, stickers, pens, paper clips, metal washers, and household freezers all play a role—are used to exploit the mutability of perception, all to the listener's benefit.

The Belts' bread-and-butter product is P.W.B. Cream Electret (£20 per 15ml jar), a reportedly nontoxic emollient whose active ingredient was discovered, by Peter Belt, to improve the listening experience by means of stress relief (see last issue). The method of delivery is not, I assume, olfactory, since the P.W.B. Cream is as free of odor as New York State wine is free of flavor.

Following up on our recent conversation, May Belt kindly sent me a jar of P.W.B. Cream Electret, along with a packet of P.W.B. Rainbow Electret Foil (£20 for three 170 by 15mm strips). My 14-year-old daughter, who was with me when I opened the small package, seemed interested in the prismatic stickers but regarded the Cream with suspicion: The jar, she said, bore an uncomfortable similarity to the products offered by such renowned audio salons as Sephora and Claire's. What are they teaching these kids?

A couple of Belts in the morning
My first morning with the Cream went like this: I warmed up my system, put on a record—a reissue of Rafael Kubelik and the Vienna Philharmonic's recording of Smetana's Má Vlast (LP, Decca/Speakers Corner SXL-2064/5)—and sat down to listen. A short while later I lifted the tonearm and smeared it with a light coating of Cream, then returned the stylus to the beginning of the record. I don't think I heard much of a change. The harp arpeggios might have sounded a little prettier the second time around, with a little more percussive snap to them. But I'm not sure.

I switched to guitarist Tony Rice's Manzanita (LP, Rounder 0092) and listened to the first two tracks. Then I stopped the music and applied a thin schmear of Cream under the front edge of my preamp. I relistened to the first two songs and was somewhat startled by the improvement. I wasn't startled by the degree of improvement, which was actually rather slight: I was startled that I heard any change at all. There was definitely a little more bounce to the picking: more nuance and sheer force audible in the downbeats carried by the upright bass. Consequently, the music sounded a bit more fun.

I skipped ahead to the instrumental "Blackberry Blossom"—a watershed recording, by the way, before which few listeners had ever heard a guitarist flat-pick this ancient fiddle tune at tempo—and was unsurprised to hear that it, too, sounded wonderful. Then I schmeared some P.W.B. Cream on the outlet strip into which all my components are plugged, and I listened again. The sound improved again: The playback was now irresistible, bouncy, nuanced, and human.

A specific example: At the very end of his first solo in that number, Rice digs in with his pick on a brief Clarence White–like flourish, hammering from the second to the flatted third of the tonic chord. That flourish jumped out as I'd never heard it before: I could almost see the young Rice grinning at his musical joke. To me, that's the sort of thing—that humanness, that organic quality—that separates music from mere sound. The Cream seemed to bring it to the fore, howsoever subtly and slightly.

Flush with my success, I creamed the cable links between the HF and LF terminals of my Audio Note AN-E loudspeakers. If it made any difference, I couldn't hear it. Likewise running a bead of cream along the underside of the front edge of each speaker stand: The music was still fine, but no better than before. Maybe my listening environment had simply gotten as good as it could?

I turned off the hi-fi and thought of three possible explanations for the improvements I did hear:

• I heard the change because I psyched myself into hearing the change.

• I heard the change because, at the moment of relistening, my system was that much more warmed up.

• I heard the change because Peter Belt really is on to something.

This Beltism business is even less straightforward than I feared.

The going gets sticky
Later that day I powered up the hi-fi again and listened to a few more selections from Manzanita. The album still sounded as good as it had earlier in the day—ie, a shade better than it usually does.

Next I turned my attention to the P.W.B. Rainbow Foil, beginning by using my scissors to cut a number of smaller strips, each about 15 by 3mm. (The instructions suggest that strips as small as 15 by 1mm can work perfectly well, but that's just too small and fiddly for me.) I listened to Tony Rice's recording of "Nine Pound Hammer," then stopped the record and placed a bit of Rainbow Foil on the label on each side. The Belts advise using one of these adhesive strips specifically to cover the number 33 1/3 on each label. Manzanita's labels lack such a number—the folks at Rounder Records have a libertarian's faith in our ability to know the right speed, apparently—so I had to guess at the right position.

I replayed "Nine Pound Hammer," and my first response was uncertainty: The recording didn't sound any worse, but if it sounded better—a little more colorful, perhaps?—the difference was exceedingly slight.

I stood up and walked away, leaving the record playing, and when I came back—Bang! The sound seemed to have taken yet another very slight step toward the live ideal. There wasn't one single performance parameter that I could identify as having improved; rather, I now had the sense that all of the earlier improvements were cumulative, and had jelled somewhat. The performance was stronger. It was more on.

I tried using the Rainbow Foil on CDs as well as LPs, but it seemed my winning streak had ended. I began by listening to World Party's Egyptology (The Enclave/Virgin 56482), which sounded thoroughly wonderful. (This was, of course, après la Crème.) Then I applied a small strip of Foil to the label side, being again confounded by the absence of what the Belts describe as a specific ideal location: the generic Compact Disc logo, central to which is the word disc in stylized lowercase letters. With the Foil strip pressed onto the approximate target, I replayed Egyptology—or as much as I could stand before realizing that, although the sound hadn't seemed to change, the music was no longer as electric and involving as before. I removed and discarded the Foil, then played the World Party disc once again—and, again, all was well. The immediacy of the performance had been restored.

Wondering if that was just a fluke, I grabbed a different CD: a fairly recent reissue of Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (Columbia S3K 87703). Again, the music thrilled me when I first played it; again, it sounded dull and lacking in animation with the application of a strip of Rainbow foil—this time covering disc in the thankfully present CD logo. Speaking of Gould, I also tried my CD of the controversial 1962 Carnegie Hall performance in which he, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Phil played the Brahms D Minor concerto using very unorthodox tempos and dynamic markings (Sony SK 60675). Although fascinating, this CD seldom makes for easy listening: The sound is awful, some of the woodwind and brass musicians are laughably out of tune, and Gould's playing, though mostly incandescent, is sloppy in a few places. (Bernstein's fatuous "This wasn't my idea, so don't blame me if you don't like it" speech, also included on the disc, doesn't help.) Anyway, this one was screechy coming and screechy going: The Foil didn't make things worse or better.

After that, I decided to save the rest of the P.W.B. Rainbow Foils for my LPs, which appear to appreciate them a great deal more.

The going gets strange
Last month I alluded to one of the more interesting of May and Peter Belt's free tweaks (free in being offered by the Belts without charge, and performable without cost). But this one is far removed from the domestic audio norm, and may be similarly far from the comfort zones of most enthusiasts. Still—what's the harm?

The Belts believe that there are various energy patterns both inside and outside every living animal—ourselves included—and that our senses work, in part, by comparing asymmetries in our internal energy patterns with asymmetries in our external energy patterns. That sounds tame enough, but here's the strange part: The Belts suggest that the very act of photographing a person imposes a temporal asymmetry on the subject's internal energy patterns, thus disrupting that person's ability to perceive any number of things, sound included. (No wonder Elvis was so unhappy.)

I was suffering one of those delusions of wisdom—in hindsight, I think it was just a headache—brought on by the screechy light of a typical February morning in the American Northeast: I imagined the time had come to set up one of my turntables, more or less permanently, as a mono-only source. That idea came and went for years, but never stayed; now it had free rein, thanks to the arrival of three products: the Miyajima Laboratory Premium Mono BE phono cartridge ($1260); the Robyatt Audio Mono transformer ($675); and the Tektron Italia Mono phono preamplifier ($1400)—all of which are distributed in the US by Robyatt Audio.

Perhaps taking a page from the Book of Orvis, with whose Green Mountain starter kit I learned how to cast a fly line, Robyatt's Robin Wyatt has, for the mono greenhorn, bundled these products as the "Ultimate Mono Record Playing System." Nicer still, he has applied to the package a special price: $3000 for all three. If recent experience is any indication, the $260 saved could buy a lot of used mono LPs.

The Miyajima Premium Mono BE requires little introduction, having been praised in these pages before (in August 2009). Its performance is very close to that of the best mono cartridge I've used—EMT's venerable OFD 25 pickup head, which has been on the market for dickity-six years—yet the Premium Mono BE costs $590 less, and is easier to use with contemporary tonearms.

The Miyajima's motor is built into a well-machined ebony body, and its unique cantilever and suspension may be closer than anything else to the mono ideal: a mechanical system that responds to all audio-frequency groove modulations in the lateral plane—that's where all the musical information exists on monophonic records, save for the earliest Berliner discs—yet is deaf as a stone to everything else. As with other Miyajima cartridges, this one's motor is designed so that the fulcrum of its moving cantilever coincides with the center of its coil former, thus allowing the cantilever the utmost swing in response to even the tiniest modulation—and, presumably and consequently, the utmost in dynamics.

The Premium Mono BE's motor is also a decidedly low-compliance thing, with a recommended downforce of 3.5gm (and a maximum downforce of 4gm). Thus, although the Miyajima can be mounted in almost any tonearm, with or without a fixed headshell—the Miyajima is a standard-mount phono cartridge, not a pickup head—it's reasonable to expect that the Premium Mono BE will perform best in a medium- or high-mass arm. Other pertinent specs are the Miyajima's 0.7mV output and its 6 ohm coil impedance.

The Robyatt Audio Mono transformer is made to that company's specifications by AK Audio of Brooklyn, New York. It's an outwardly simple thing, the placid surface of its casework being marked with only a single input jack, a single output jack, a ground lug, and a two-position toggle switch labeled Low and Hi—descriptors that refer to the relative input impedance of each setting, not to the amount of gain provided. (Bullish though I am about phono transformers, I suppose it's too late in the game to force on their makers any sort of standardization of nomenclature.) As it turns out, the Robyatt transformer is designed with a single secondary and two primary coils; the selector switch works by choosing between the primaries.

Robyatt's transformer is inwardly simple, too: Even though I knew it was a monophonic device—heck, I used it in my system for weeks before bothering to learn what makes it tick—I was nonetheless surprised when I opened its case and saw inside just a single transformer and some bits of wire and connectors. Though that transformer appears well made, to the extent that one can tell such a thing, the casework is as basic as such things get, comprising no more than two U-shaped pieces of copper, apparently formed on a press brake. The level of fit and finish is rough.

The final product in this mono triumvirate is Tektron Italia's Mono Phono preamplifier, made in Italy exclusively for Robyatt Audio. Its case is a wooden frame-style box with a solid copper top that doubles as a ground plane (shades of Hiroyasu Kondo's early Audio Note amplifiers). The Tektron's power supply starts with an onboard mains transformer—wall warts need not apply—with an EZ80 full-wave rectifier tube for the rail voltage and a silicon rectifier bridge for the heater voltages, the latter controlled by a well-implemented voltage regulator. Reservoir caps for both parts of the power supply seem sufficient to the task, notwithstanding the limited space inside the small chassis.

The Tektron's gain is supplied by a pair of 12AX7 dual-triode tubes, which share the signal path with a passive RIAA filter. Gain specifications aren't provided by the manufacturer, but the Tektron's output appeared to be similar to the moving-magnet phono section of my Shindo Masseto preamplifier. Only a single input jack is provided, alongside a pair of output jacks, both of which carry the same capacitor-coupled signal. Build quality is excellent, especially given the Tektron's relative affordability, and the parts—including Siemens and Telefunken tubes—are similarly fine. This is a solid little piece of kit, as my English friends would say.

The Trinity on Test
Smartly or not, I began by using the three Robyatt products together, and was delighted by the results, which came awfully close to the performance of my own decidedly mono-friendly system. (My high-mass EMT 997 tonearm is perfectly suited to both of my EMT true-mono pickup heads—each of the latter has only a single coil—and my Shindo Masseto preamp was custom-wired by its maker to provide a true-mono phono input.) There did, in fact, appear to be good synergy among the Robyatt trio, the result being a colorful, tactile, and ultimately involving mono sound, not to mention good freedom from surface noise—always a concern when the bulk of one's listening comprises LPs shrink-wrapped over a half a century ago.

Used individually, each of these products was at least likable in its music-making character—and two were downright lovable. The Miyajima Premium Mono BE charmed me no less this year than during its previous visit to my home: This sample sounded every bit as chunky, colorful, forceful, and fun as I'd remembered. My only disappointment came when I found, through sheer happenstance, a mono groove to which the otherwise fine-tracking Miyajima could not stick: a song on Introducing the Beau Brummels (Autumn LP/103) that contains an especially loud electric-bass line. (My EMT OFD 25 tracked it all right, but that cartridge is designed for a 5gm downforce: the sort of thing that sets fainter hearts a-flutter.)

As fond as I am of the Miyajima, there were times during the listening period when I thought the most impressive of the three mono products supplied by Robyatt Audio was their proprietary mono step-up transformer. It worked well with every mono cartridge I had on hand, including my EMT OFD 25. Through the Robyatt transformer, the EMT sounded a little smoother than through my Silvercore One-to-Ten, with none of the slight glare heard through the latter with heavily modulated piano recordings, such as the great Walter Gieseking LP of Beethoven's "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" sonatas (Angel 35024). And the Robyatt transformer's tremendous sense of scale and cavernously deep bass response lent welcome power to such discs as Vladimir Golschmann and the Symphony of the Air's fine-sounding recording of Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra (Vanguard VRS-1065).

And without meaning to wear the exclamation point off of my hyperbole button, it wasn't until I had the Robyatt transformer in my system that I was really struck by the excellent sound on Introducing the Beau Brummels, from the deep, well-colored electric bass to the tambourine, wood blocks, and closely miked nylon-string guitar, all of which unfailingly leapt from the mix through the Robyatt gear. (And has the tremolo circuit in a Fender amp ever been put to better use than on Declan Mulligan's guitar break in "Just a Little"?)1

I was right. One Saturday morning I walked from my apartment, near the Flatiron building, to Sound by Singer, then located on Lexington Avenue near 33rd Street, and rode home in a taxi with a brand-new pair of Snell Type J/II loudspeakers. I'd auditioned them against a few other speakers in the same general price bracket—the closest runner-up was the Mordaunt-Short Festival—and persisted in preferring the Snells' seemingly unique combination of dynamics, clarity, and very good scale. Perhaps best of all, the Snell Js cost slightly less than I was prepared to spend: $680 in 1984 money. (Thus I was able to bring home a brand-new Grace F9E cartridge as well. What a happy day that was!)

Although preceded by one or two others—the first models from Burhoe Acoustics were especially noteworthy—Snell's bookshelf speakers of the 1980s were arguably the first loudspeakers from a major New England manufacturer to abandon acoustic suspension in favor of a bass-reflex enclosure: The 8" SEAS paper-cone woofer of the first Snell Type J, ca 1981, was loaded with a 2"-diameter reflex port mounted on the front baffle. Not surprisingly, the Snell J was more sensitive than the norm, being rated at 90dB; that characteristic, in combination with the J's nominal 8 ohm impedance, led Snell to recommend as suitable amplifiers with as little as 15W of power. (For the J/II of 1983 and beyond, Snell moved the reflex port to the rear of the enclosure; whether for that or for a combination of reasons, the J/II's sensitivity spec was bumped up to 92dB. Think of it!)

The Snell Type J also used a 1" Tonegen fabric-dome tweeter, crossed over at 2300Hz. Both the woofer cone and the tweeter diaphragm were doped: the former so heavily that it's mistaken, from a distance, for plastic, the latter just enough that every original sample I've seen looks brown instead of black, owing to the manner in which the coating darkens over time.

Back to that Saturday. I brought the new Snells upstairs to my studio apartment—I think the single large living/dining/bedroom was about 20' by 45'—and installed them close to the far corners, on wooden stands I'd made for the EPIs years earlier: almost certainly not the right size or height, but in those days I didn't obsess about such things. I connected the new speakers to my heavy-gauge twin-lead speaker cables of long-forgotten provenance, then luxuriated in the thing I'd sought: a big, clear sound that suited my room and allowed a little more life to shine from my records.

I didn't buy Snell Type J/IIs for their sensitivity: 30 years ago, that wasn't an issue, especially with a hulking 70Wpc of solid-state power at my disposal. (And it appears that the J/IIs' sensitivity didn't result from Peter Snell's having particularly prioritized that quality.) I bought my Snells simply because I liked them.

Stop and smell the neuroses
I enjoyed my Snells for a few years, then sold them to a neighbor, because I was young and stupid and wanted to try something different. I bought myself a pair of Magneplanars, followed by Thiels, ProAcs, Eposes, Spendors, Lowthers, more Lowthers, Quads, more Quads, and . . . another pair of Snells.

Well, not quite Snells. I actually bought a pair of Audio Note Type Es: high-efficiency box loudspeakers from the company whose CEO, Peter Qvortrup, was once Snell's UK distributor—and who was so enthusiastic about the efficiency of their early-1980s bookshelf models that he bought the rights to keep making them, long after Snell Acoustics ceased doing so (footnote 1). (When founder and chief designer Peter Snell died, in 1984, the company's directors hired as his replacement the Canadian engineer Kevin Voecks, himself a talented designer, but one who steered the product line in a very different direction.) Peter Qvortrup and his own chief designer, Andy Groves, made some running changes to the Types E, J, and K models, all of which they continue to manufacture as, respectively, the AN-E, AN-J, and AN-K, including minor adjustments to the cabinet dimensions and crossover frequencies, plus a switch from particleboard to plywood for the enclosures.

And, of course, Audio Note continues to refine and upgrade the basic formulae, now offering various performance levels and cosmetic options. But the basic Snell characteristics remain in place: reflex loading, elegantly simple aesthetics, a response curve tailored with room-boundary reinforcement in mind, a baffle wide enough to support the longest wavelengths the tweeter is capable of launching (footnote 2), and, of course, high sensitivity and good drivability—the latter in terms of the value, shape, and phase angle of the thing's impedance curve.

Audio Note's loudspeakers are also designed and made so that each woofer, tweeter, and crossover component is hand-selected and mated to a single unique loudspeaker; the electrical characteristics of those parts are recorded and stored in a database maintained at the factory, logged in accordance with the finished speaker's serial number. Should the owner of that speaker ever need to replace any of those parts, he or she must contact Audio Note, so that they can select a replacement that exhibits the correct electrical characteristics for that specific unit: Only then can its performance be maintained.

Today that approach is widespread, if not quite de rigueur, among manufacturers of perfectionist-quality loudspeakers—and Peter Snell was the designer who pioneered it. He discovered early on the manner in which slight changes in the values of passive parts, coupled with slight changes in speaker-coil resistance and inductance, could affect a speaker's audible performance. Writer and turntable specialist Michael Trei has described for me how Snell used to visit Sound by Singer—and, presumably, other early Snell dealers—with an adjustable, remote-control crossover device, whose resistance and capacitance settings he would trim from his listening seat in an effort to fine-tune speakers in the field.

Stellar Js
What does a 25-year-old Snell J sound like today, especially in comparison to a modern Snell-alike such as the Audio Note E?

Earlier this year, Bill Henk, of dealership Fidelis AV, in Derry, New Hampshire, loaned me his own pair of Snell Type J/IIs. They'd been well looked after, with spotless brown fabric grilles and only a few minor scrapes and mars on their attractive oak cabinets. Looking at them made me feel as if it were 1984 all over again (sans disagreeable roommate, thank God), and if I hadn't already known where Bill had bought these, the portion of my brain where materialism and nostalgia overlap would have kicked in to convince me that, yeah, sure, I think these must've been my Snells. Milo and Otis had made it home after all.

That's not to say that Bill Henk's speakers sound the same as when they were made. Bill mentioned ahead of time that he'd had to replace the foam surrounds of both woofers. And when his J/IIs arrived here in Cherry Valley, it was obvious that the dope on their tweeter domes had stiffened and cracked to a potentially sound-shifting extent.

With the Snell J/IIs placed on 20"-high stands (thus with their tweeters at pretty much the same height as those of the Audio Note Es), and with their enclosures fairly close to the sidewalls and their reflex ports firing into the room corners (also à la the Es), the first thing I noticed was the difference in apparent sensitivity between the two models: Compared to the average stand-mounted speaker of today, the Snell J/IIs sounded noticeably more sensitive, and in fact worked well with my 25Wpc Shindo monoblocks. But the Audio Notes were more sensitive still, if not tremendously so.

Footnote 2: Knowing that the physical size of a full wave is equal to the speed of sound (call it 1115 feet per second) divided by the frequency of the wave in cycles per second (call it hertz), we can also know that a 2300Hz wavelength is 0.485' (call it 5.817") in length; the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength.

Why vintage? Because the best vintage gear offers an abundance of musically agreeable qualities that are missing from even the best contemporary gear.

Those qualities may or may not be crucial to your enjoyment of recorded music (the liberated male of the 21st century is free to prioritize for himself those aspects of playback fidelity that matter most, some of which aren't at all well served by antique equipment), and the difficulty and expense of going retro can prove too much for those with too little time, too little money, and too little background knowledge. Yet for some of us, the characteristics associated with vintage gear are precisely the things we seek.

Not that we go looking for abuse. Consider that there are contemporary phono products that offer at least some of the grunt and drive of their vintage counterparts. And it isn't hard to find amps and preamps that match or even exceed the electronics of yesteryear in terms of color, texture, impact, and scale. Yet when it comes to loudspeakers, there are precious few modern examples that approximate the characteristic strengths of their vintage counterparts—and none that meet or exceed them.

So for some of us, the question becomes: Why not vintage? Abandoning the coaxial drivers and the compression drivers and the horns of yesterday in an age of more advanced machines makes no more sense than abandoning oil paints in the age of acrylics: In a pursuit where technology is meant to serve art, it's never wise to limit one's choices. And for me, at least, that axiom gains certainty every time I'm told, by the sad, defensive gurus of yesterday, that these are choices we're not supposed to like.

Dork passage
The portion of my basement that I think of as my workshop, where I repair and pulverize things in more or less equal measure, has at its center a line of four steel floor jacks. I learned something about them last winter, while building a cabinet for my 78rpm records: If I use a hammer or a screwdriver to tap on one of those jacks with even an eyelash of force, the sound sends my sleeping dog into a barking fit of considerable frenzy. (I regret the impression that our two-year-old Jack Russell terrier behaves well the remainder of the time, her default conduct being that of a cognitively challenged demon with a severe personality disorder.) During the weeks and months since I made this discovery, visitors to our home have seldom failed to be entertained.

During the weeks and months since I made this discovery, I've also been struck by a parallel: As some readers have noted, I need only mention the names of certain classic hi-fi products in order to fill my in-box with hate mail from a dozen apparently retired or otherwise underoccupied ham-radio enthusiasts, the catalyst for their geek-seizures being my audacity in writing about certain things without first consulting The Experts: themselves.

Thus this column comes with a warning label: The 3000 words that follow are devoted to a handful of specific vintage loudspeakers. If, in reading this column, you're inspired to convivially share recommendations of other such products, we'll be delighted to hear from you. If, on the other hand, you're inspired to offer a self-flattering contrast between the thoughts that follow and the godlike rightness of your own audio knowledge and opinions, be advised that we will make fun of you, typically by imitating either Truman Capote or the comic-book guy from The Simpsons while reading your letter aloud to family and friends, who seldom fail to be entertained.

Trouble is, the field of vintage loudspeakers is one with which I have precious little experience, the choices being so many, so diverse, so rare (the best of America's vintage speakers have long been of interest to collectors, thus many are now overseas), so expensive, and, more often than not, so damn big. Consequently, for this column I turned to some real experts. I began by calling two vintage-loving friends to ask them to recommend colleagues of experience, circumspection, good taste, and, where vintage audio represents a commercial interest, a reputation for honest and honorable dealing. I ended up with a list of 12, comprising manufacturers, distributors, retailers, rebuilders, and one journalist, in the US and Europe. Of these, three declined to participate, and another two participated but declined to be named. That left the following seven names, offered in alphabetical order:

Keith Aschenbrenner, owner of the manufacturing, distribution, and retail company Auditorium 23.

Early Bender, proprietor of HiFiTown and son of the late Walt Bender, founder of Audiomart.

Jonathan Halpern, owner of the distribution company Tone Imports.

Vu Hoang, owner of the retail store Déjà vu Audio and manufacturer of his own vintage-inspired electronics and speakers.

Joe Levy, owner of the manufacturing company Tempo Electric and colleague of the late Dr. Arthur Loesch.

Herb Reichert, New York audio journalist and former Audio Note distributor.

Jonathan Weiss, owner of the audio manufacturing, distribution, and retail company Oswalds Mill Audio.

Air-conditioners have improved since 1962. So have automobiles and contact lenses and light bulbs and copiers and television sets. So have lots of other consumer goods.

It's reasonable for the average person to assume that hi-fi gear has also improved over the years, but that isn't entirely true. Although the audio industry has made strides in eliminating tonal distortions and in creating for the listener a more exciting spatial presentation of recorded sound, to me early playback equipment endures in sounding far more tactile, dramatic, and colorful. In those respects, contemporary gear has not only failed to hold its ground since 1962, it has markedly declined.

In other consumer industries, developmental gains appear to come at relatively little cost. In the quest for cars that are safer, faster, and more comfortable, fuel efficiency hasn't merely remained steady: It has improved, along with everything else. Yet audio engineers often seem no better at banishing distortions than I am at shooing flies out of the house: They can't get rid of one without letting in another. Amplifier designers sacrifice immediacy and speed for power, phonograph designers sacrifice musical dynamics for low tracking force, and loudspeaker designers swap efficiency for extended bass and treble.

Think of it: A loudspeaker's most fundamental task is to convert electricity into sound—a task at which the average new model fails more resoundingly with each passing year. What the hell kind of progress is that?

Funny you should ask
The up side of living inside an engineering swap meet: One can choose from a very wide range of commercial products, each with a different combination of strengths. As I noted in last issue's column, all in this hobby are free to prioritize for themselves those characteristics of live music to which the highest playback fidelity should be applied—and some of those aspects are indeed served well by combinations of powerful amplifiers and inefficient loudspeakers. In years past I have been not only impressed but delighted by such things as Stax F-81s driven by a Krell KSA-50, and Magneplanar MG-IIIs paired with a Conrad-Johnson Premier One. Those and other such systems can be considered every bit as good as the sort to which my present tastes have led me: just as faithful, but faithful to different aspects of the art of music.

As I've also pointed out, listeners who assign a greater importance to impact and color in music playback will find much to enjoy in certain vintage loudspeakers. Yet to find, buy, or install those speakers may not be as easy as one might wish. RCA LC1s don't turn up for sale very often. Western Electric 753s are even less likely to appear on the market—and when they do, their prices are horrifying. Altec Flamencos and Valencias weigh nearly 100 lbs each and tend not to fit in many compact cars—or compact rooms.

In this month's column, then, the question switches from Why not vintage? back to Why not new? In response to a growing interest in all things antique, not to mention an enduring shortage of full-range loudspeakers capable of being driven by low-power tube amplifiers, some contemporary manufacturers are bringing to market speakers whose vintage DNA is unmistakable. Five such models spring immediately to mind, two of which I've auditioned at length, another two of which—the DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/96 and the current-day version of the Klipsch La Scala—are due to arrive here within the next month or two, and one of which remains elusive. The last is the classic Western Electric 753: not the extinct original, of course, but faithful reproductions presently offered by two different companies, with a third on its way. Shindo Laboratory and Déjà Vu Audio both offer custom-built speakers inspired by the original 753—in both instances, price varies with the exact driver complement desired—and Auditorium 23 plans to release one in the near future, as part of their Hommage series.

That brings us to two interesting and very different vintage-vibe speakers of my recent experience:

Oswalds Mill Audio Mini
Knowing that the other three loudspeaker models from Oswalds Mill Audio are built—and priced—on a grand scale, one might expect that the comparatively small and affordable OMA Mini ($18,000/pair) might also be comparatively disappointing: a compromise product for which people with smaller rooms and budgets are forced to settle. Nothing could be further from the truth, and after two visits to OMA's showroom in Brooklyn's Dumbo district—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, for you non-New Yorkers—the Mini remains my favorite of their speakers in a number of ways.

OMA's loudspeakers are distinguished by their use of conical horns, cast from aluminum at a foundry near their workshop, in rural Pennsylvania. So it goes with the Mini, in which a proprietary horn-loaded compression driver handles the high and mid-frequencies. The two-way Mini also uses an 8" woofer in a ported enclosure made of the buyer's choice of birch ply or bamboo ply. The cabinet walls are thick, the quality of the joinery just as impressive; the front-firing port runs nearly its entire 14" width. The Mini's carbon-fiber woofer has an impregnated fabric surround and appears rather stiffly suspended; that plus the narrow port—the enclosure seems to split the difference between bass-reflex and aperiodic designs—combine to make what one assumes is an intentionally low-Q system in which smoothness of response and sensitivity (rated at 95dB) are emphasized over bass extension per se.

Listening bore that out. Aesthetically, the Mini's upper-frequency horn stands out from the rest of the speaker, but sonically the opposite was true: OMA's smallest loudspeaker is remarkably coherent. Its crossover, which I'm told is quite simple, is apparently also quite well done.

That quality is complemented by a well-chosen frequency range. The Mini's bass response, specified as 3dB down at 60Hz, is balanced by a treble range that leaves the speaker sounding neither dull nor lightweight. At OMA's Dumbo showroom, a pair of Minis gave fine weight to smaller-scale orchestral music—a 1961 recording of Igor Stravinsky conducting the Columbia Chamber Ensemble in his L'Histoire du Soldat Suite sounded amazingly lifelike—and modern pop alike. Far more important was the generous sense of touch the OMA speakers gave to that and virtually every other recording I tried over the course of two listening sessions there. Plucked strings—never in short supply in Stravinsky—leaped from the system as they should have. (And what are horns for if not for tactile musical thrills such as that?)

The styling of the OMA Mini, by the industrial designer and lighting specialist David D'Imperio, is distinctive: wood grain here, steel legs there, curves, angles, visual weight, and open spaces. One assumes a pair of them would go nicely with contemporary furnishings, yet I've seen proof of how their whimsical modernism jibes with the rich textures of antique furnishings and Oriental rugs. What I haven't seen is how they look in my listening room; as of this writing, review loaners aren't available. But hope springs eternal: I think this is a wonderful speaker that asks prospective owners to take a few chances, and richly rewards them with real-sounding music.

Line Magnetic 755 I
I wrote last month about the famed Western Electric 755a, a full-range drive-unit admired by most vintage-speaker experts of my acquaintance. Now a company called Line Magnetic Audio has begun to manufacture their own version of this classic. Their new 755 EX driver is a faithful reproduction of the 755a in every way but two: Its nominal impedance is 8 instead of 4 ohms, and, instead of a permanent magnet, the Line Magnetic 755 EX uses a field coil—an electromagnet—that's energized by DC from an outboard power supply.

This is no mere affectation, vintage for the sake of vintage: The magnetic flux density of a permanent magnet is known to change in response to vibrational energy and heat—of which moving-coil speakers are reliable producers—whereas a field coil with a very good DC supply can focus a far stiffer, stabler, sturdier energy field on the voice-coil gap, allowing dynamic contrasts in particular to be resolved with far greater efficiency.

This new-old 755, keenly anticipated for years, is available now in a loudspeaker called the Line Magnetic 755 I ($8995/pair), in which two field-coil 755 EX drivers are installed in floorstanding cabinets of original design and bundled with a pair of Line Magnetic PR-3 field-coil power supplies, all made in the People's Republic of China. System sensitivity is specified as 94dB.

There are approximately 30 companies and/or individuals in the world who produce tonearms for commercial sale, and to browse their offerings is to harbor a similar suspicion. Some of those folks seem out of touch with their own products—an impression bolstered by the specifications they've provided for our most recent Stereophile Buyer's Guide. I don't want to single out anyone for ridicule, but there are enough nonsensical numbers on the tonearm pages to suggest a slight inability to discriminate between effective length, effective mass, and an effective hole in the ground. I wouldn't mind, except that the dust of confusion lies especially thick on the transcription-length (defined as 12" or longer) tonearms that I tend to prefer.

I'm happy to say that Ortofon stands apart from those companies that stock 12" tonearms in the same manner that J.C. Whitney stocks air-cleaner elements for the AMC Gremlin: The Danish company seems proud of their vintage-vibe arms. Maybe that's because Ortofon is sufficiently proud of their vintage-vibe cartridges that they persist in making new ones.

As a fan of Ortofon's tonearms and cartridges, I was happy to hear about Ortofon's new TA-210 tonearm, whose 329mm effective length makes it suitable for vintage turntables and the generously sized plinths with which they're commonly used. Of course, a longer-than-average tonearm is often assumed to be also more massive than average: a quality that can complement the generally low-compliance cartridges and pickup heads that vintage enthusiasts also favor. In that regard, however, the Ortofon TA-210 was somewhat surprising.

Ortofon TA-210 tonearm
First, a few basics: The Ortofon TA-210 ($1899) is a pivoting tonearm with traditional gimbaled bearings for lateral and vertical movement, and a curved aluminum-alloy armtube. The latter is unique in my experience for being damped, not by means of an inert coating or stuffing, but through the application of two extra parts: a rubber insert fitted to a short slot on the underside of the tube, and a proprietary thermoplastic elastomer insert fitted to an even shorter slot on the top of the tube. Ortofon suggests that, instead of encouraging the storage of unwanted energy by completely filling the tube, the sparing use of different materials in different parts of an arm can lessen the ill effects of unwanted resonances by spreading them over a wider range of frequencies.

In contrast to such things as the EMT 997 and the Linn Ekos SE, the Ortofon TA-210 is a static-balance arm: Tracking force is applied not with a spring, but by adjusting the counterweight's position to lessen its effect on arm mass. Said counterweight is supplied with an extra 45gm metal ring, which serves as an auxiliary weight: Two rubber O-rings on the inner surface of the ring allow it to be securely snugged into place when using pickup heads or cartridges weighing more than 21gm (the latter in tandem with the Ortofon's supplied 15.5gm alloy headshell). Arm height is easily adjustable, though not on the fly—about which I admit to caring little. A magnetic antiskating device, calibrated to correspond with downforces of up to 3gm, is provided; downforce itself is calibrated up to 4gm on a simple ring-type indicator, which has separate scales for using the arm with or without the auxiliary counterweight.

The TA-210 also comes with a removable cable, terminated with phono plugs at the far end and a five-conductor DIN plug of the usual sort at the near end. This allows the user to experiment with the cables of his or her choice, and removes from the installation equation the heartache of soldering.

Speaking of which, one of the TA-210's nicest features is something that ought to come packed with every perfectionist-quality, four-figure tonearm: a simple, accurate, well-thought-out installation jig. This 14" strip of clear plastic has a spindle-sized hole at one end, and a hole at the other that's sized for the guide pin of a two-piece locating device, the larger portion of which fits precisely into the tonearm's mounting collet. I have aped, in my own rough way, the same sort of thing for use with my EMT and Schick arms, using thin strips of plywood instead of clear plastic and, as a locating device—swear to God—a large-diameter spike from an old Linn Isobarik speaker stand. (With just a bit of sanding, the latter fits perfectly into the EMT 997 mounting collet.)

The precise distance between the centers of the two holes of the Ortofon jig is 316.6mm: That's the arm's spindle-to-pivot length, aka the mounting distance. (The stylus overhang of the TA-210 is 12.4mm; that, added to the mounting distance, gives us the 329mm effective length mentioned above.) And that brings us to the reliably entertaining subject of cartridge alignment, which of course constitutes one of the main reasons for wanting a 12" tonearm in the first place: Installed and adjusted properly, a longer-than-average tonearm, with its less-than-average overhang and smaller-than-average headshell offset angle, offers the potential for lower-than-average tracking-angle error—and the audible distortion that arises therefrom.

As fellow Stereophile contributor Keith Howard observed in his seminal feature "Arc Angles: Optimizing Tonearm Geometry" (March 2010), the performance advantage of a transcription-length tonearm is real, but so, too, is the potential for higher tracking-angle error and distortion if the thing isn't aligned perfectly: a pitfall for which I remain vigilant. Notably, Howard also computed a set of alignment specs that are measurably superior to the model on which most manufacturers and hobbyists rely, but I have resolutely not gone down that road with the Ortofon TA-210—or at least not yet. For now, I'm sticking with the tried and mostly true Baerwald-alignment math, and will save the tweaking for another day.

Back to the jig: When my review sample of the Ortofon TA-210 arrived, I elected to mount it on my Thorens TD 124 turntable, and began by cutting a new, blank tonearm board from plywood. (The plinth I made for this turntable, also from plywood, has four threaded inserts at its right-rear corner, allowing me to interchange armboards and arms while maintaining hard-won alignment settings.) With the new armboard in place, I set loosely on its surface the arm's mounting collet—with the Ortofon locating device at its center—then slipped the clear plastic jig over the locating device at one end and the platter spindle at the other. Doing so established an arc along which the arm's mounting hole could be accurately located, and when I found the spot along that arc that suited my board, I pressed the guide pin of the locating device into the wood to mark the correct drilling point. Then, holding the collet firmly in place, I removed the pin and used it to mark the drilling points for three mounting screws.

Of course, there remain a few readers at the other end of the spectrum: people who chafe at every challenge to their own and their gurus' well-worn opinions. In response to that August column, and excepting the readers who were merely frustrated that their own vintage-speaker choices didn't make the cut, the complaints amounted to little more than the usual wheeze about "distortion lovers" who refuse to wave the flag for stereo imaging effects and timbral "neutrality" (and never mind all those silly notes and beats).

Thankfully, and against the best efforts of at least two great men of the fourth estate, the freedom endures to choose whatever combination of performance characteristics one wishes. And for hobbyists who value imaging and neutrality above all else, vintage loudspeakers in particular really are a poor choice. But the hobbyist who would condemn his peers for choosing old gear over new would do well to remember: All perfectionist audio is vintage audio. In the greater context of Western consumerism, virtually no one buys separate amps and preamps. Virtually no one buys separate CD transports and digital/analog converters. And virtually no one thinks that the Bose Wave, itself considered a wild extravagance by most Americans, is anything less than the zenith of domestic playback quality. In 2012, any high-quality music system is an anachronism: For the owner of a three-box dCS digital front end to condescend to someone who owns and enjoys an old EMT turntable and a collection of pickup heads is the saddest example of hypocrisy, hubris, and sheer jackassedness I have yet to see from this hobby—and that's saying something.

Next year's orthodoxy
Before taking a second look at the Line Magnetic 755 I loudspeaker, with its old-style field-coil drivers and power supplies, let's turn our attention to another vintage-inspired loudspeaker, this one with a decidedly modern permanent magnet: "a machine that winds its own spring," to paraphrase the French physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1751).

In this instance, the words "vintage-inspired" don't go far enough: The coelacanthic Klipsch Heresy III ($850 each: Klipsch's pricing conventions are decidedly mono-friendly) is among domestic audio's living fossils, the original Heresy having been introduced in 1957 as a "center-channel" speaker for use with stereo pairs of the original Klipschorn (introduced in 1946, also still in production). The name is said to have sprung from inventor Paul Klipsch's apparently healthy sense of irony: The Heresy was the first Klipsch loudspeaker to lack a horn-loaded bass driver—a departure from Klipsch form that a friend and fellow audio enthusiast described as "heretical." The name gained traction in the early 1970s, when a Klipsch advertising campaign cited the use of Heresy speakers in the PA system of Holy Cross Episcopal Church, in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Heresy III, which the manufacturer says is little changed from the original, is a three-way loudspeaker in a simple sealed enclosure. The MDF cabinet stands only 24" tall—the Heresy looks much bigger in photographs—yet incorporates a removable frame-style base that tilts the baffle up toward the listening area. The Heresy III's tweeter is a 1" titanium-dome unit, fitted to a molded Tractrix horn with an integral waveguide; the mouth of the horn is approximately 4.5" wide. Midrange frequencies—from approximately 850Hz to 5kHz, according to Klipsch's specifications—are handled by a compression driver with a titanium diaphragm, loaded with a molded exponential horn. The latter extends a full 11" into the Heresy III's cabinet, and its mouth is approximately 9" wide.

The woofer is no less anachronistic: For frequencies below 850Hz, Klipsch selected a very-low-excursion driver with an 11" pulp cone, a generously sized dustcap made from an apparently different type of paper, and a stiff surround of impregnated fabric. Like the midrange and treble drivers, the woofer is fastened directly to the MDF baffle with wood screws. The Heresy III's internal crossover network is designed to allow biwiring; two pairs of binding posts are fitted to a recessed, molded fixture of the usual sort, and brass shorting links are supplied. The Heresy III is described as having an electrical sensitivity of 99dB/W/m and a nominal impedance of 8 ohms.

Could the $1700/pair Klipsch Heresy III be the cheapest route to the sort of touch and impact associated with vintage horn speakers. Based on their performance in my room—about 2.5' from the front wall, 1.5' from the sidewalls, and slightly toed-in toward the listening area—one could be forgiven for thinking so. The drum intro to "Caravan," from the classic album Money Jungle, by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach (LP, United Artists/Classic 15017), was a delight: as wonderfully tactile as I've ever heard it. The piano was a bit clangy at times but not horribly so, and the string bass had superb texture and color.

But the Heresy III was less than ideal for well-recorded classical music. The sense of touch that served the speaker so well with Roach's drumming simply wasn't enough to communicate all the force of Mahler's Symphony 2 with the Utah Symphony under Maurice Abravanel (LP, Vanguard/Classic VCS-10003). More to the point, the Klipsch's tweeter imparted a hint of stridency to the sounds of flutes and the upper harmonics of the strings.

Additional listening confirmed my mixed impressions. I loved the Heresy III's bass performance, and even though the speaker didn't go terribly deep (Klipsch says the Heresy III extends to 58Hz; corner placement helped it go a little deeper than that in my room), low-frequency notes were realistically taut and fast, with lots of substance and very good touch. In "Bitch," from the Rolling Stones'Sticky Fingers (LP, Rolling Stones COC 59100), the kick drum and electric bass had terrific body and momentum. I heard the same qualities in Paul Chambers's string bass in "Flamenco Sketches," from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (LP, Columbia/Classic CS 8163). As I scribbled in my listening notes, "This is exactly how I think a string bass ought to sound." The Heresy III didn't allow the instrument its full weight, of course, but it had color and body, and it played the notes engagingly, in tune and in time.

But the trebles on the Stones LP, which are less than silky to begin with, sounded raspy and tiresome. On Kind of Blue, Miles's trumpet sounded slightly brittle at times (and Julian Adderley's alto sax was a little too spitty). And later that same evening, when I put on the Amadeus Quartet's great recording of Schubert's String Quartet 14 in d, D.810 ("Death and the Maiden") (LP, Deutsche Grammophon), the first word out of my mouth was, literally and reflexively, "Ouch."

The Klipsch Heresy III had a little more bass than the Line Magnetic 755 I. It was also more sensitive, and capable of sounding bigger when sited in the corner. I enjoyed those qualities thoroughly. But while its upper-frequency harshness wasn't severe, it was sufficiently audible in my room to be a deal breaker. At the end of the day, I found myself wondering if the Klipsches might be more suitable for larger rooms, where listeners and horns can maintain a more respectful distance from one another.

I sing the magnet electric
John Atkinson visited my home earlier this summer, as did Jonathan Halpern of Tone Imports (US distributor of Shindo, Auditorium 23, and Line Magnetic). Neither dropped by just to play around with the stereo—we had some very important eating and drinking to do that day—but we nevertheless listened to a few records, including some of our favorite Ella Fitzgerald sides. After a while, JA said that the Line Magnetic 755 I loudspeaker's lack of bass extension detracted from his enjoyment of the music, and suggested swapping in another new speaker that had just arrived for review. Hot on the heels of that observation, JH mentioned that he had yet to try the very new 755 I in a variety of different rooms, so he couldn't swear that its floorstanding cabinet would place its single driver at precisely the correct height for every listener in every setting.

For the qualities I most value in a music system—impact, substance, texture, color, and, above all, the ability to play lines of notes with a realistic sense of momentum and flow—the venerable Garrard 301 and similar well-made turntables with powerful motors and idler-wheel drive are the sources to beat. Unfortunately, good-condition samples of the Garrard 301 and 401, the Thorens TD 124, and any number of exotic EMTs have become scarce and ever more expensive.

Yet there exists an alternative that offers a great deal of the 301's forceful goodness, and more than a little of its sheer vintage coolosity, all at a fraction of the price: the Rek-O-Kut Rondine Jr., an American-made turntable that was produced in sufficient quantities that, one hopes, the extortionate effects of vintage-market greed might be kept at bay. Perhaps best of all, the Rondine Jr. is simple: so simple that its restoration, not to mention the construction of a suitable plinth for it, is well within the capabilities of most audiophiles.

Junior moments
The products of the original Rek-O-Kut corporation of New York City (footnote 1), failed to attract my interest for a very long time—partly, I admit, because I was put off by the company's name. I treasure the records I've collected since age 10, and the idea of offering up a single one to a machine whose name contains not only the word cut but a malevolently goofy misspelling of same (cf Megadeth) was a bridge too far. By now, having researched the brand to the slim extent that fading memories and the Internet allow, I know that home record cutters were, in 1939, the first commercial products of the company's founder, a former screw-machine operator named George Silber. But today, audiophiles and broadcasters remember Rek-O-Kut for their generally high-quality turntables, sold under a model name that could have belonged to a heroine from a Roy Orbison song.

Introduced in 1956, the Rek-O-Kut Rondine turntable offered a machined-alloy platter, large-diameter bearing, powerful motor, and a three-speed (331/3, 45, and 78 rpm) idler-drive mechanism, all for the reasonable price of $74.95, tonearm and plinth not included. The upmarket Rondine Deluxe ($119.95) added a pilot light and an upgraded (Pabst) motor, while the Rondine Jr. ($49.95) offered high performance in a no-frills package.

The Jr., which is built around the same motor, platter, and platter bearing as the regular Rondine, is perhaps the most interesting Rondine of all. It has two matching idler wheels—one for each of the Jr.'s speeds (footnote 2)—and a simpler mechanical design than that of the Rondine (and a far simpler mechanical design than that of the Garrard 301 or the Thorens TD 124). The Jr.'s single control knob is fastened to the motor assembly itself. By moving it to the extreme left, the user brings the smallest portion of the stepped motor pulley into contact with the leftmost idler wheel, forcing it into contact with the platter's inner rim and driving same at 331/3rpm; by moving the knob to the extreme right, the larger-diameter portion of the motor pulley contacts the rightmost idler, for higher-speed playback. Because one idler wheel sits about ¼" higher than the other, no portion of the drive mechanism needs to be raised or lowered with respect to the others. With the control knob in its center position, neither idler is engaged, and an integral power switch—activated during use by means of a simple metal cam—is turned off.

Vibration control in the Rondine Jr. is likewise simple. Below deck, the heavy motor hangs from a mounting plate with the help of four chunky isolation grommets, the centers of which are fitted with thin brass ferrules for their mounting bolts. Above deck, the mechanism that supports the idler bearings and wheels is attached to the main plate using three of the very same grommet-and-bolt affairs.

That serenely simple main plate is also home to the Rondine Jr.'s platter bearing: the one part of the Jr. that may be a little too simple, and surely the one that comes in for the most criticism from vintage-audio pundits. The steel bearing shaft, which is 5/8" in diameter, is press-fitted into the hub of the alloy platter, and ground flat for contact with a ¼" steel ball bearing. The latter sits at the bottom of a bearing well that's ostensibly crude compared to those from Garrard and Thorens. Rek-O-Kut literature refers to a proprietary Rek-O-Kut lubricant, which the user is advised to both pour into the well until the ball is just covered, and smear over the bearing shaft; a spiral groove in the latter is presumed to help maintain that coating.

More fun with alcohol and swabs
There was a day in early June when I still had yet to even see an original Rek-O-Kut turntable in person; the next day, I had two of them in front of me, in pieces; a third arrived a week later. And two weeks after that, a nearby friend brought by Rek No.4, which he'd just purchased on eBay. Just lucky, I guess. I was also fortunate that two of those machines were Rondine Jrs., and was offered the chance to buy one of them, with an apparently original plinth, for $100. (I passed on the tonearm, the headshell of which screamed Pontiac.)

Footnote 2: There are actually two Jrs.: the L-34, which functions at 331/3 and 45rpm; and the L-37, which offers 331/3 and 78rpm.

As you know from the last installment, it was surprisingly easy to find replacements for the Rondine's rubber isolation grommets, which had cracked and crumbled with age; would that it were so easy to install the new ones. As anyone who's ever tried squeezing a stiff grommet into an opening of finite size can tell you, this took a certain amount of effort—so much that I began to wonder if I'd ordered the right size after all. But in time—with a bit of coaxing from a small, flat-bladed screwdriver wrapped with a piece of fabric to help prevent the rubber from tearing—all seven snapped into place. The new grommets didn't come with new brass ferrules, so I cleaned and refitted the originals, the latter task made less daunting with a very small amount of light oil. Bear in mind that the ferrules must be fitted only from the side of the grommet where the molded center tube is the longest; those tubes face downward on the main top plate, while the grommets fitted to the motor plate are installed with their center tubes facing upward.

After replacing the top plate's trio of isolation grommets and brass ferrules, I reattached the idler-wheel support mechanism at those three points using ¾" flat-head bolts, secured from underneath with very light nuts. (Washers aren't used against the flared ends of those brass ferrules—or at least they weren't on either of the Jrs. at my disposal.) To avoid getting oil or sawdust on the newly resurfaced idler wheels, I decided to wait until all else was done before installing them. Also, before reattaching the motor, I attended to some chips in the finish of the edge of the top plate: Volkswagen Silver Leaf Metallic touch-up paint, purchased from a local dealer, proved an acceptably good match. I also touched up the area corresponding with the Rek-O-Kut's control knob, but that turned out to be a waste of time: after reassembly, the new paint was worn away in a matter of minutes. Live and learn.

I cleaned the Rek-O-Kut's motor casing before reattaching its spade-shaped isolation plate—now fitted with four new grommets and ferrules—then cleaned the upper and lower lubrication tubes using a pipe cleaner dipped in lighter fluid, most of which I blotted away with a tissue after applying. I also cleaned the motor pulley, but neglected to check its fit on the armature—and that turned out to be a mistake. If you set about rebuilding a Rondine Jr. or similar Rek-O-Kut, take my advice and use a suitable wooden drift to seat the pulley all the way onto the shaft, as far as it can go; failure to do so will result in occasional light rubbing between the 33 1/3rpm idler wheel and the 45rpm portion of the pulley—interference that, in my case, proved distinctly audible.

I fitted the motor and its isolation plate back together, carefully aligning the four remaining ¾" flat-head screws with threaded holes on the motor's own top plate. (I saved the oiling of the motor for later, since the lubrication tubes seem prone to drip if the motor assembly is tilted too far in their direction, thus posing a serious risk to the unfinished wooden plinth.) The finished motor assembly had to be rebolted to the top plate at two points—a small hex nut near the platter bearing and the threaded control knob at the front—but before doing so, I replaced the two 8-32 machine bolts that secure the metal stops used to limit the control knob's travel: Because the original slot-head screws were pitted and corroded from carelessly made adjustments, I substituted nice-looking Phillips-head bolts of stainless steel.

Because I'd discarded the badly worn original AC cord during disassembly, I now needed to remake some of the Rondine Jr.'s electrical connections. Simple enough: Of the two wires that exit the motor casing, one goes straight to one leg of the AC cord, the other to one of the two terminals on the SPST (Single Pole Single Throw) power switch; the remaining switch terminal goes to the remaining leg of the AC cable—and that's it. There should also be a capacitor across the terminals of the switch, to suppress noise and prevent switch bounce, and a thin, braided ground wire between the motor and a washer on the rearmost of two bolts that fasten the motor isolation plate to the main top plate; both had broken on my sample, so both got soldered back into place. (The Rek-O-Kut, like most such turntables, uses a shaded-pole induction motor, so a "phasing capacitor" isn't required to get the motor spinning in the correct direction.) A final note on turntable cosmetics: Although it's not something I've seen on any other Rondine Jr.—I don't know about other Rek-O-Kut models—I asked my friend Neal Newman to polish the rim of my platter, which he did. Superbly.

Hidebound
I returned my attention to the plinth project, for which I'd sawn a total of eight sheets of ¾" plywood, each measuring 13¾" by 22¼". In last month's column I described the size and shape of the cutout required to accommodate all of the Jr.'s underdeck parts, and that's the opening I made in the two top layers of my plinth. I temporarily fastened the rebuilt Rondine Jr. to layer 2 and, working from beneath with a straightedge, marked off those portions of the opening that wouldn't be needed for clearance in layers 3 and 4. The result was a roughly kite-shaped opening that provided sufficient room for motor, platter bearing, and wiring. Layers 5 and 6 required only a smaller, squarish cutout, to accommodate the bottom of the motor. And because I'd learned from the mistakes I made while building a plinth for my Garrard 301—I was late in realizing that a compliantly suspended motor may sit lower than expected, once the relevant springs and grommets have settled in—I applied the same cut to layer 7, just in case.

I applied one more lesson learned from that 301 project: A few months ago, I noticed that the left-rear corner of my Garrard's cast-alloy chassis became warm to the touch after playing just a few sides. Two things occurred to me, more or less simultaneously: 1) the heat was coming from the vicinity of the 301's motor, and 2) I'd neglected to ventilate the solid bottom layer of the plinth. As it turned out, at about the same time, an e-mail glitch prevented me from seeing a message sent by reader and speaker designer G.R. Koonce, who had given me that 301 in the first place: Art, your motor is probably overheating because you neglected to ventilate the solid bottom layer of your 301's plinth. Thus the bottom layers of all my plinths are now perforated. I haven't cooked a single motor since.

Gluing up was straightforward, despite my efforts to make things more difficult than they needed to be. As described in my March 2011 column on plinths, I prefer natural hide glue over modern aliphatic and polyvinyl glues; the latter remain a bit rubbery after drying, but hide glue forms a harder, altogether more wood-like join that enhances rather than impedes the transmission of energy. My hide glue of choice has been Franklin International's Titebond Liquid Hide Glue, which is premixed, doesn't require heating, and dries slower than raw hide glue, allowing for much longer setup times. (Scott Bowen of Franklin International assures me that Titebond Liquid, though sometimes hard to find, remains in production, and is stocked by most specialty woodworking shops and websites.) Earlier this year, when I set about repairing a minor crack in a Martin guitar, luthier Jim Merrill reminded me that Knox gelatin is identical to hide glue, and can be used as such when dissolved in the proper amount of water and heated in a microwave. I used that approach for gluing up layers 7 and 8, but reverted to Titebond for all others: the initial tack of the former is simply too strong for an application in which large parts must be aligned with care. As always, regardless of adhesive choice, the same old motto applies: One can never be too rich or too thin, or own too many generously sized bar clamps.

Love is in the air
Using a block of scrap wood to suspend the nearly finished motor unit over its opening in the finished plinth, I put a few drops of 3-in-One brand SAE-20 motor oil in each of the lubrication spouts, then lowered the Rek-O-Kut into place and secured it with six 6" by ½" stainless-steel wood screws. Then I installed the resurfaced idler wheels on their bearing studs, reusing the original thick and thin fiber washers above and below and adding two drops of light oil to the hub of each before securing them with E-clips. Finally, I replaced the steel bearing ball in the platter bearing well, added just enough Quaker State 10W-40 motor oil to cover it (this amount per the original Rondine Jr. instruction manual, available courtesy VinylEngine.com), and lowered the platter into place. Then I lowered into place the bearing shaft and platter, plugged in the AC cord, and applied power to the 33 1/3rpm idler.

For the first four minutes, the motor turned the platter only very slowly. During minutes 5 through 14, it perked up a little. Then, at minute 15—almost on the dot—Jr. got the lead out and hit full speed. Assuming the motor bushings are backed with some sort of oil wicks, and assuming the latter have become a bit gummy over the years, I'll hold off adding more oil until I've had a chance to disassemble the motor and give it a good cleaning.

To those axioms I would add a qualification: My own tastes in sound are best served by a combination of a very low-compliance cartridge and a high-torque motor, the latter intended to let the record groove literally drive the former. But that relationship can't exist, let alone thrive, without a pickup arm capable of handling the considerable energy present within the cartridge—while at the same time, one hopes, remaining unperturbed by the vibration and noise given off by the motor.

Those who associate the lowest of low-compliance cartridges with the most dramatic and impactful playback often choose a pickup head such as the Ortofon SPU: a choice sometimes also accompanied by a longer-than-average "transcription"-style tonearm, whose greater-than-average mass can work hand in glove with a stiff cartridge suspension. But while the SPU may be the champ, it isn't the only serious competitor in the ring. Besides, not every audio perfectionist wants a 12" tonearm—and many of those who do don't have a turntable that can accommodate such a thing.

Happily, I now have experience of at least one 9" tonearm that can stand, literally and figuratively, alongside its 12" competition.

Size isn't everything
Twenty-five years ago, when vinyl still overshadowed the slouching birth of CD in the world of high-end audio, most retailers and reviewers could be counted on to have in their possession one or more of just seven predominant turntables: the SOTA Sapphire and its variants, the VPI HW-19 and its variants, the Linn LP12, the Rega Planar 3, the Goldmund Studio, the Oracle Delphi, and the Roksan Xerxes.

If the market for high-end turntables appears flatter today, it's only because the selection therein has continued to spread slowly outward, like a stain. While the above firms remain in business—notwithstanding the odd change in ownership or the molting of models from their lines—their goods are now sold alongside high-end turntables from Artemis, Audio Note, Audiostone, Avid, Bauer, Brinkmann, Clearaudio, Continuum, DaVinci, Denon, DNM, E.A.R., Feickert, 47 Laboratory, Funk Firm, Galibier, Grand Prix, Hanns, Kondo, Kronos, Kuzma, Merrill-Scillia, Michell, Micro-Sekei, Music Hall, Nottingham Analogue, Onedof, Origin Live, Palmer, PBN, Platine Verdier, Pro-Ject, Redpoint, Rockport, S.A.P., Scheu, Simon Yorke, SME, Spiral Groove (née Immedia), Spotheim, T+A, Transcriptors, Triangle Art, TW Acustic, Wave Kinetics, Well Tempered Lab, Wilson Benesch, Win Labs, and at least a half-dozen companies and individuals who sell rebuilt, reconditioned, or modified samples of classic idler-drive turntables from Garrard, Lenco, and Thorens (footnote 1).

Sixty-odd companies now compete with one another in offering four-, five-, and six-figure turntables to you and me and perhaps a hundred thousand other hard-core vinyl enthusiasts: arguably a case of too many trying to sell too much to too few.

High prices aren't the only ills in this product-clogged community: The poor devil who wishes to bring to market a new tonearm no longer has a clear idea of which turntable will wind up under his creation—a state of affairs that has surely hampered innovation. One example is that linear-tracking tonearms, the placement requirements of which place considerable constraints on the installer, have all but disappeared from the market.

The cynic might conclude that the only variables with which to attract tonearm buyers—apart from sound, of course, which remains unknowable until a given pairing can be tried—are build quality and aesthetics. Assuming so, there can be no more beguiling line of tonearms than those designed and built by Frank Schröder, a Berlin resident who spent the early part of his adult life as a watchmaker—so poetically ideal an embodiment of craftsmanship that it sounds improbable.

Schröder, whose handmade tonearms are known as much for their use of exotic hardwoods as for their Åberadjustibility, is now one of the busiest men in perfectionist audio: Since his tonearms began appearing in the US in significant numbers—I saw my first one in 2004, on a Galibier turntable—Schröder has enjoyed the distinction of being consistently backordered, with wait times that stretch to a year and beyond. Audio enthusiasts who share my passion for steel-string musical instruments will see parallels in the careers of such luthiers as T.J. Thompson, Wayne Henderson, and Lynn Dudenbostel.

As any politician might have hoped, an American small business has answered the call: Artemis Labs, of Simi Valley, California, has commissioned from Schröder a unique tonearm design called the TA-1, which the US company now manufactures, in-house, to the inventor's specifications. Sheer availability is the great advantage to this arrangement: Rather than waiting several months for a Schröder creation to put between his or her turntable and phono cartridge, the eager audiophile can have one now, the definition of now left only to the imagination of one's FedEx courier. The US-made arm also carries a price advantage: The Artemis TA-1, which retails for $3950, is less expensive than all but one of the tonearms made in Berlin by Herr Schröder.

Key to all the above—and especially to its relative ease of manufacture—is the fact that the Artemis TA-1 is designed with high-tolerance ball bearings: a more conventional choice than the magnetically damped, suspended-unipivot bearing around which other Schröder arms are built. Yet the TA-1's bearings, which use hybrid-ceramic rather than steel balls, appear sophisticated in their own right, especially inasmuch as the centers of rotation for both the horizontal and vertical bearings are located closer than usual to the level of the record platter: a performance ideal for any designer who wishes to minimize the effects of record warps and changes in vertical tracking angle (VTA). Schröder accomplished this by placing his tonearm's vertical bearings at the bottom of a columnar axle that supports—and, in both horizontal and vertical planes, moves with—the armtube. (I believe a similar approach has been used by Mörch in their non-unipivot arms; perhaps it's something in the umlauts?) According to Artemis Labs, the horizontal bearings of the TA-1 are also damped, internally, by hidden magnets.

Horizontal and vertical bearings alike are enclosed within a short, cylindrical housing of alloy about 23mm in diameter, above which the bearing axle is topped with a cylinder machined to the same diameter from a very different material: a brown phenolic that I mistook, at first glance, for wood. It's through the latter part that the armtube passes, held tight with a grub screw that also allows a small degree of rotation, allowing the user to adjust cartridge azimuth. An alloy arm pillar, also 23mm in diameter, extends below the bearing housing and supports a pinball-flipper–shaped gantry of phenolic that holds a cuing mechanism of the usual sort, alongside the TA-1's antiskate mechanism. The last is a chunky little hex-head grub screw, the far end of which is fitted with a tiny neodymium magnet; its threaded opening is angled in such a way that turning the screw clockwise brings the magnet closer to a metal tang secreted within the bearing housing: Thus can the antiskate screw increase, as desired, its outward pull on the armtube.

A major portion of that armtube is indeed made from an exotic wood: kingwood (Dalbergia cearensis, a close cousin to Brazilian rosewood), to be precise, machined with a gentle taper. (The tube is 11mm in diameter at its smallest, 12mm at its largest.) The wood is nearly solid, being drilled with a tunnel of just 2mm wide for the wires. The frontmost portion of the armtube and the rather long counterweight support are machined from aluminum alloy. The former is milled with an elliptical slot, through which a separate aluminum cartridge platform is held in place by a single bolt; the width of the front end of the armtube is such that it can be straddled by two cartridge-fixing bolts only when the cartridge platform is close to the correct offset angle (the very tip of the tube is machined at that angle, serving as a helpful guide). The "hanging" counterweight comprises three machined brass parts, the largest of which can be interchanged with ones of different mass—available from Artemis Labs, as are cartridge platforms of different mass—to suit different cartridge-weight ranges.

Based on my experience, how easy one finds it to install an Artemis TA-1 will probably range from average to above average, depending on the turntable in question. For my vintage Thorens TD 124, I began by mapping out the arm's 222mm spindle-to-pivot distance on a blank Michael Tang tonearm board and drilling a 15/16" hole for the arm pillar. (Frank Schröder recommends an opening of between 23 and 25mm.) The TA-1's alloy arm-mounting collet, which has approximately the same shape as its cuing gantry, is fixed to the armboard at a single point; on a metal or polymer armboard, a hole must be drilled and tapped for an M6 machine screw (supplied), but a wooden surface such as mine can be accommodated with a wood screw (for which I drilled a 5/32" pilot hole).

I encountered only one notable problem: Because the platter of a Thorens TD 124 sits rather low in its chassis, the height difference between tonearm board and record surface is considerably less than with other turntables—and so the TD 124 user must keep the tonearm as low as possible within its own height-adjustment range. Yet I was prevented from doing so by interference between the top of the arm-mounting collet—the point of which I'd aimed straight toward the front of the turntable—and the bottom of the cuing mechanism. I tried rotating the cuing gantry to a position where the two parts didn't hit each other—with the gantry pointing to 8 instead of 6 o'clock—but when I did that, I found that the antiskate mechanism no longer worked properly.

Footnote 2: Artemis Labs, 260 Marvista Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91106. Web: www.artemislabs.com. US distributor: AYDN Audio, Inc., 679 Easy Street, Simi Valley, CA 93065. Tel: (818) 216-7882. E-mail: sales@aydn.com

Of far greater importance, of course, is the artistry between its covers: The person who, in 2013, buys an ink-and-paper copy of In Cold Blood is guaranteed the same reading experience as the person who bought his or her copy on the day the book was first released. That's how the publishing industry works, God bless them.

The idea behind the recording industry purports to be the same, but the reality is different: The consumer who, in 1966, bought a copy of Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic performing Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde was rewarded with one experience. The person who bought the same thing 40 years later got something else altogether.

And it's a shame, because that Mahler recording is important: As important in its own way as In Cold Blood, or any number of other buyable works of art.

I feel the same way about the Beatles catalog. Their music is as important as it is charming and fun and adventurous. I can't imagine a time when the Beatles' reputations as writers, arrangers, and performers—as artists and innovators—won't be held in the same high esteem as they are today.

But the person who, in 2013, takes an interest in hearing the Beatles for the first time will not hear them at their best, because all the currently available commercial recordings of their work are presented in digital sound rather than the recordings' native analog. And although much of that digital sound is good digital sound, it isn't up to the best analog standards. At the same time, the digital sound of some selections in the Beatles catalog is downright mediocre—and not because contemporary digital technology is so good that it exposes "flaws" in the original: a lie of which the technopologists in the recording and audio industries never seem to tire.

Not only that, but those digital files, good and not-so-good alike, represent not the original analog master tapes, but versions of same that were subjected to modern reequalization and compression, the primary purpose of which was apparently to boost the bass content in an effort to create a sound more appealing to modern listeners (footnote 1).

Not only that, but the recent and richly ballyhooed reissues of the Beatles albums on LP—sold singly or as The Beatles Stereo Vinyl Box Set (Apple AEMI 33809)—were all mastered not from the original analog master tapes but from 24-bit/44.1kHz digital copies (footnote 2) thereof (a revelation that comes courtesy of my friend and colleague Michael Fremer, who broke the story on AnalogPlanet.com).

The people responsible for this new wave of LP reissues imply that it was their concern for the fragile and irreplaceable analog master tapes that led them to cut the new vinyl from digital files. I would suggest that the cutting of new analog masters is precisely the sort of project for which such tapes are kept and preserved in the first place: If not for this, then what? Another, presumably more "perfect" wave of digital remakes every 15 years?

The people responsible for the new LP reissues imply that 44.1kHz digital is good enough for what we are led to believe will be the last series of Beatles LPs. I, on the other hand, would suggest that good enough is not good enough. I think the consumer of 2013 ought to be able to enjoy any music—let alone the Beatles, for God's sake—in sound that is at least as dynamic, natural, colorful, wide of bandwidth, and altogether listenable as when the recordings first came out. Hearing these recordings at their best should not be the privilege of only a relative handful of fortunate record collectors. Yet with every new wave of reissues—or, in the case of the dubious Love LP and DVD-A, reimaginings—we are given considerably less than the best, all while being asked to pay for the same music over and over again. Perhaps the time has come to rock the boat.

Doris gets her oats
Let's pause to consider an important point: A signal that has been digitized is a signal that has been digitized, period. Once you convert an analog music recording—a thing of virtually infinite resolution and remarkable complexity—into a digital file, you have reduced the amount and the density of data in that recording by at least some degree. After A/D conversion, you can do any number of things with that file, the most common being to convert it into a new analog signal, but the latter will no longer be exactly the same as the original.

In a domestic playback system, D/A conversion is usually performed just upstream of the preamplifier. However, if you prefer, you can have your digital recordings converted even further upstream: by the company from which you buy them, at the LP-mastering stage, right before they're pressed onto vinyl. Considered as mere data, there's no difference between the two, and to expect better, more analog-like sound from the latter than from the former would seem an expression of the most ardent optimism. Or, as I stated in the June 2012 edition of this column: "[A]n analog pressing of a digital recording is still a digital recording. And the 'better' the mastering job, the more digital the results will be. If you leave a pointillist watercolor out in the rain, dots will run. But they're still just dots."

But I admit, I've noted one respect in which digital recordings do seem to sound better when played back via the analog medium of phonography: They seem capable of sounding more physical than they do via CD or streaming file, with a distinctly better sense of touch of mallet on drum, plectrum on string, that sort of thing. Whether this is something that digital playback technology simply can't do very well in its present state, or whether there's some arcane relationship between physical media (as opposed to the mere moving of electrons) and the physicality of sound, I don't know (footnote 3). I'm at peace with the possibility that I'm deluding myself, and with the even more seditious possibility that, if I'm not delusional, the thing that I'm hearing and enjoying is a distortion. Big deal.

And so it was that I approached with an open mind the opportunity that I found in November: My friend Sasha Matson had just received his own Stereo Vinyl Box Set, pre-ordered earlier in the year, but his immediate travel plans prevented him from listening to it for another couple of weeks; Sasha wondered if I would like to borrow the box for a few days—thus giving me a chance to audition all 16 discs and to compare them with my own collection of Beatles recordings.

I began in the middle, comparing the new version of Revolver with my own original Parlophone stereo copy of same, the latter being in mint-minus shape. The first thing I noticed about the new release was nothing: absolutely no surface noise whatsoever. I didn't hear one single tick or pop, nor the slightest hint of groove-grunge, at any time while auditioning this record. The same was true of every LP in the box—all of which, I should add, were also supremely flat: a "Stop there" recommendation for some record lovers, and I don't suppose I blame them.

That said, I was surprised that Revolver—which I consider one of the Beatles' best-sounding recordings—was among the albums most poorly served by Apple's recent remastering job. On the original, for example, Paul McCartney's voice in "For No One" is colorful and immediate: almost startlingly well recorded. On the new LP, however, he sounded veiled and chalky by comparison: characteristics that marred the vocals on almost every track on this disappointing reissue.

I decided then to take a less scattershot approach, and went back to the beginning of the collection—and was rewarded, to at least some extent, for my effort. The reissue of the first title, Please Please Me, sounded quite good: open, clear, and crisp whenever called for, but without being brittle. And the physicality of the playing was indeed superb: Check out the very deliberate arpeggio with which George opens "Misery," and his chording and single-note work in "Ask Me Why." Ringo's drumming sounded similarly fine—if compressed, overall, in the original recording—as did the percussive note attacks in Paul's conspicuously boosted electric-bass lines.

With the Beatles brought more of the same good clarity and physicality. And in numbers such as "All I've Got to Do," the LP was more realistic and listenable than the 2009 stereo CD reissue, the CDs making a mushy, crunchy mess of such things as vigorously struck hi-hat cymbals.

Then I ventured into The Unknown: My own collection of Beatles albums, such as it is, comprises two original Parlophone monos, one original Parlophone stereo, a German EMI/Odeon, and a mix of American and Canadian Capitols—but I've never owned a vinyl copy of A Hard Day's Night, and thus have no way of knowing if the original recording has the same brittle top-end crunch I hear on the new LP—and, for that matter, the 2009 and 1988 stereo CDs. Of all the A Hard Day's Night releases I've heard, the mono CD of 2009—available only as part of the boxed set The Beatles in Mono—is by far the most tolerable and impactful. I can only assume that an original mono LP is better still, while admitting that the 2012 LP, though not a terribly good-sounding thing in and of itself, might well be among the more acceptable alternatives.

Footnote 2: These are apparently the same 24/44.1k remasterings, downsampled from 192kHz originals, that were released in that resolution as FLAC files on a USB dongle in 2009. The 2009 CDs were decimated to 16-bit word length, of course. See Robert Baird's article on the remastering in the October 2009 issue of Stereophile.—Ed.

Footnote 3: And, yes, it's another of those things that the combination of a low-compliance pickup and a high-torque turntable motor do far better than their wimpier cousins.

Bass, like sex, is something most young men desire in excess: To the novice, quantity trumps quality, and as long as he can hear from his playback system the deepest sounds of an orchestral bass drum or five-string electric bass (low string tuned to B-0 or C-1), he is completely satisfied. Meanwhile, bass texture, bass color, bass momentum, bass nuance, bass tension, and, especially, bass feel have now joined the short-nosed sturgeon, the Arkansas fatmucket clam, the Iberian lynx, and the teacher of European culture on the edge of extinction. And relatively few music lovers seem to mind: As far as low-frequency content is concerned, most people—even most audiophiles—are as mere consumers, who swallow without tasting and whose hunger is never sated.

Exceptions abound, I'm sure, but I suspect that most of the people who are as deeply dissatisfied as I with the current state of bass are themselves older hobbyists. Yet, as with John Stuart Mill's famous observation on the relationship between intelligence and political orientation, the inverse isn't necessarily true: God love them, but many of my contemporaries are just as enduringly infatuated with sucky bass as their younger counterparts, notwithstanding the former's more sophisticated tastes in other aspects of sound reproduction. For some damn reason, almost everyone on Earth has convinced himself that the overblown, rubbery, and altogether relentless low-frequency reproduction that one hears so much at the typical audio show is realistic.

How can this be? Why is it that so many mature, savvy, concertgoing listeners—not to mention so many mature, savvy, concertgoing audio critics—are willing to accept bad bass?

One possible answer comes to us from the file folder labeled "Jed Clampett's Oldsmobile": After years or perhaps even decades during which only the humblest playback gear could be afforded, some hobbyists are happy to have any bass at all. I suppose I'm at least slightly guilty of that myself.

Add to that the legendary and nearly limitless capacity of the middle-aged male for self-delusion, colorful evidence of which is found in the story of Leo Fender: a man who pioneered the design and manufacture of the solid-body electric guitar, yet who himself had no musical training or talent. Today, of course, listeners recognize the solid-body electric as an appealing and artistically valid variant on the sound of the Spanish guitar, but that wasn't the opinion of Fender, who considered his "purer"-sounding guitar a successor to the more traditional types. Fender, who was apparently deaf to the distinctive tonal signature of his own instrument—especially as used with various different amplifiers—betrayed in later interviews some sense of astonishment that the acoustic guitar did not vanish from the Earth altogether at the dawn of electrification.

So it goes in our relationships with the low-frequency performance of modern playback gear. We all know, deep in our subconscious minds, that most of the reproduced low-frequency content we hear from our systems is unrealistic. But we also suspect, just as subconsciously, that that's the best we can do. And, just as important, we have grown to rather like modern bass playback in its own right.

So it goes here. I don't quite disdain modern bass: That's too strong a word. I'm just a bit fatigued—a bit fatigued and a bit unsatisfied. I have listened to, accepted, and, in my way, enjoyed modern bass for a goodly while. But now, late in the day, I've had enough, thank you. Now I'd like to have good bass. And if I can't have good bass, I'd rather have no bass at all. Not to be brusque about it.

Snippy is not a word I would use
What's the difference between real bass and unreal bass? One of the latter's most defining characteristics can be described with a single pejorative word: pump. Real music, with the possible exception of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is not pumped at the listener, nor is it squirted, hurled, shot, pummeled, thrust, or thrown at the listener. Yet the majority of "high-end" systems I've heard throughout my life—and the vast majority of the ones I've heard at audio shows—do just that. The effect is not unlike trying to make a corpse seem lively by shooting it out of a cannon: The force with which the thing arrives isn't realistic—just horrifying.

Let the record show that virtually all of the bad bass I've heard from domestic playback gear has come from bass-reflex loudspeakers, usually driven by high-power amplifiers. As a general rule, high-excursion/small-diameter woofers have tended to sound worse—pumpier, if you will—than their larger comrades.

Real bass, on the other hand, as created in real settings by real musicians, simply happens: It is there, existing as a very long sinusoidal wave that's audible to listeners and detectable by microphones over a wide range of distances from the source. Acoustic instruments that produce audible tones pitched below 80Hz can excite the air in a performing or recording space by means of: large physical size (the soundboard of a grand piano); a large, enclosed volume of air that's open to the room via an aperture of predetermined size (the bell of a contrabassoon); or some combination of the two.

And there is always a sharply physical, tactile component to real bass—a sense of tautness—that is welded to the fundamental component of its sound in a manner that's all but indescribable. Real bass isn't merely fast: It's natural.

Let the record show that, of the relatively little good bass I've heard from domestic playback systems, most has come from woofers that measure no less than 12" in diameter, usually built with very tight, low-excursion surrounds. Some of those drivers have been horn-loaded, but that wouldn't seem to be a requirement. And most were manufactured before I made my First Communion.

An aside: Beginning in the 1980s (although this nauseating fad may have begun earlier), I watched more than one audio salesperson endeavor to prove the "quality" of a bass-reflex loudspeaker by lighting a match, holding it next to the reflex port of the speaker being demonstrated, playing at high volume a recording containing considerable amounts of high-amplitude bass, and watching with glee as the emitted air extinguished the match. Beginning in 2013 you can prove the irrelevance, if not the sheer pig-brainedness, of that stunt by lighting a match, holding it next to the F-hole of a friend's bass viol, asking said friend to play a low E, and waiting for the match to burn your thumb. On second thought, let someone else do it.

Because our front steps are only 36" wide, I had hoped to use my utility ramps to slide the 30"-wide Valencias onto the porch from the hatch of my Volkswagen Tiguan: a crazy-sounding scheme that actually worked a couple of years ago, for extracting an upright piano from the back of a friend's pickup truck. But my VW's hatch wasn't tall enough to make such a thing possible, so I had to lift the Altecs the old-fashioned way: with muscle (such as it is), luck, and the palliative effects of cursing/ I thanked God it wasn't snowing.

I found the Altecs on eBay, which is where I also found my Quad ESLs, my Altec 755C drivers, one of my Thorens TD 124s, and various other vintage-audio bits. Throughout the past year my search engine had uncovered a few Valencias (and Flamencos, which differ from Valencias only cosmetically), but it's impractical to ship very large speakers, and none of the Altecs I'd found were offered by sellers within a day's drive—until now. This one-owner pair was in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a mere four hours from where I live.

The eBay listing said "make an offer," so I did. Perhaps because the seller realized that I lived near enough to collect the merchandise in person, thus saving him a certain amount of trouble and uncertainty, the haggling was minimal. Within minutes of my making an offer the Valencias were mine, for $1600.

Two weeks later, on a day when the weather seemed sure to cooperate, I set out with road music in my CD player (the Byrds'Ballad of Easy Rider album), road food on the seat next to me (a box of Nilla Wafers), and my cheapo Garmin GPS unit on the dashboard. It was a fine drive: Route 8 in western Massachusetts was a visual treat, with solemn mountain faces, beautiful snow-bordered streams, and lots of quaint roadside businesses, including Otis Poultry ("HOME OF THE CUSTOM LAID EGG") and The Other Brother's Wholesale Seafood ("HOME OF STILL FLOPPIN' FRESHNESS"). Viewed from the highway, the outskirts of Waterbury looked grim, but that was nothing compared to my destination city: The Altecs, whose original owner had passed away within the year, now awaited collection in a warehouse around the corner from Bridgeport Triumphant Ministries, and right next door to the Salvation Army Home for Men. The seller was a big, friendly bear of a man who seemed unperturbed by his surroundings, and who had no difficulty hoisting the speakers by himself. With two Valencias in the back of my Tiguan—face up, side by side, and not an inch to spare—I set off for home.

I turned right at the corner nearest the warehouse and saw, from the corner of my eye, a large, colorful sign nailed to the siding of an otherwise nondescript white house: a helmeted skull with red and yellow wings, and the words "HELLS ANGELS, BOSTON CHAPTER." Destiny's unmistakable fingerprints were everywhere that day.

For your pleasure
Introduced in 1966, the Altec Valencia—officially known as the Altec Model 846A—is a two-way loudspeaker in a furniture-grade cabinet shaped not unlike a console TV of the 1960s. Its low-frequency driver is the Altec 416-Z, whose 13.5" pulp cone is formed with a pleated, low-compliance surround impregnated with a shiny black rubber that, on my pair, still seems fresh. The 416-Z looks even better from behind, with its heavily ribbed frame, an alnico magnet the size and shape of a 28oz can of beans, and lustrous hammertone paint in Altec's trademark shade of pale, slightly bluish green: the real inspiration, some say, for Ken Shindo's choice of chassis paint.

Midrange and treble frequencies are reproduced by an Altec 806A compression driver that incorporates an aluminum diaphragm, an aluminum flat-wound voice-coil, a 13oz alnico magnet (footnote 1)—and, perhaps needless to say, the same hammertone-green paint job as the woofer (footnote 2). The same shade, without the hammered texture, adorns the horn that loads the driver.

That cast-aluminum horn is the Altec 811, so-called in part because the low end of its coverage extends to 800Hz. (The Altec 511 of the same era, often found in the Voice of the Theater loudspeaker—from which the Valencia and its sibling are derived—extends down to 500Hz.) The Altec 811 horn measures 18" wide by 7" high, and its front is curved to a radius of perhaps 12" or so.

A brief aside: As I write this, my Valencia-throated system is turning the groove-bumps of Jacques Loussier's first Play Bach LP into goose-bumps. This is, quite simply, some of the most convincing, involving, and thoroughly exciting sound I've experienced at home. Bass notes aren't just putting in an appearance once or twice per measure—they're being played, with real feeling and force, on an obviously large double bass. And despite the apparent distance of the microphones from the drums, there's a remarkable sense of strength and, again, force behind the drummer's every move, down to the subtlest strike on the crown of the smallest cymbal. My wife, who came in and sat down a moment ago, described her own amazement at the latter, and at the clarity of the softly struck triangle in Bach's Prelude 2 in c.

Now then: With just a bit of luck, the careful reader may have guessed the model designation of the Valencia's crossover network; it's the Altec N-800F, in which, I assume, the N stands for network and the F for filter. (I'm sure I don't have to tell you the model number of the filter used with the above-mentioned 511 horn.) The N-800F's potato-sized metal enclosure, which is bolted to the inside of the Valencia's rear panel, is riveted shut, so I have yet to see its contents for myself. That said, the crossover is user-adjustable by means of a brightness control, whose chicken-head knob is set against a green (what else?) background with white numbers that range, counterintuitively, from a maximum of "0" to a minimum of "10." (The midrange/treble horn is not, however, entirely silent at "10.") According to the online posts of experienced users, this control is a purely resistive L-pad, which maintains, regardless of setting, the loudspeaker system's overall impedance: a God-fearing 16 ohms. And speaking of God, it's interesting to note that this magazine's founder, J. Gordon Holt, was among the most ardent admirers of the Altec Voice of the Theater (footnote 3).

Finally, we return to that scourge of Volkswagens and English majors alike: the Valencia's oven-sized cabinet. Its baffle is made of 0.75"-thick plywood, as are its walnut-veneered top and sides. The Valencia's bottom is chipboard, the rear panel is chipboard and Masonite, and both the simple, sparse bracing and the frilly grillework are made of softwood. The inner surfaces of the speaker's bottom, rear, and right-hand side are damped with fiberglass insulation, but not so the top, the baffle, or the left-hand side, which suggests that the designers felt that catching interior reflections on the first bounce was good enough. Very hefty bolts and T-nuts are used to fasten the woofer to the inner surface of the baffle, above which the 18"-wide horn perches within a 20"-wide gap; the two open spaces that straddle the horn confer on the cabinet its designation as aperiodic. Only the two bottom corners of the horn are fastened to the baffle—also with good bolts and T-nuts—while an aluminum strap holds the compression driver firmly to a piece of bracing nailed to the inner surface of the top. (Interestingly, that brace is cracked in both of my Valencias, though not to the point of uselessness.)

The mouth of madness
There's no telling how long my new-old loudspeakers had gone unused. But after I wrangled the Valencias inside and connected then to my Shindo Haut-Brion amplifier—which required a bit of fussing, since the Altecs' input connectors are nothing more than small-gauge screw terminals (footnote 4)—the Valencias sounded rather bassless for 10 or 15 minutes. Then, with no further intervention, the bass appeared, and all was well.

Maybe not all. On the rear panels of both Valencias are identical labels encouraging the user to adjust the treble level to suit his or her room—but advising that, under "average conditions," the ideal balance will be had with the knob set to "2." Which is just two numbers away from full-blast.

Footnote 2: In later examples of the 846A and in apparently all iterations of its successor, the less-well-regarded 846B, green paint was dropped in favor of dark gray.

Footnote 3: JGH reviewed the Altec A-7 in Vol.1 No.12, cover-dated "Spring 1966."—Ed.

Footnote 4: Although it's fun to imagine those high-enders who would head straight for the nearest fainting couch at the sight of the Altecs' tiny terminals, the fact is that those connectors really are crazy. Note, also, that the distinctly modern-looking threaded connectors on the drivers themselves are way bigger, and probably way better, than the screw terminals on the rear panels. That's crazy, too.