Lenco's calling card was an idler-drive system with two distinctions: Rather than driving the inner rim of the record platter with a horizontal idler wheel, every Lenco model used a vertically oriented wheel to contact the platter's underside; and every model eschewed a stepped motor pulley in favor of one far longer than average, yet smoothly tapered from near to far ends. The benefits of a conical pulley are especially obvious: It allowed users user to fine-tune playback speed and pitch; eliminated the need to make and to stock different-size pulleys for different markets; and, most significant, eliminated the need for a complex, clunky, and ultimately costly speed-change mechanism. Changing the speed of a Lenco's platter is accomplished by sliding that vertical idler wheel—held in place by a simple if somewhat flimsy carrier mechanism—from one end of the pulley to the other.

Lenco's drive system held the promise of a product that could sell for considerably less than the top-of-the-line Garrards and Thorenses, yet had the potential for comparable performance. Whether the company succeeded at the latter can be answered only by those hobbyists who've actually owned and used a Lenco turntable (footnote 1) Until this year, the only Lenco I'd experienced was the one inside my early-1980s Keith Monks RCM Mk.II, that British manufacturer having bought and used Lenco drive systems, bearings, and platters as the basis for its record-cleaning machines from day one. Nevertheless, opinion prevails that even the most upmarket Lenco 'tables were hobbled by overresonant platters and top plates, and by the fact that most Lenco models were bundled with Lenco tonearms of underwhelming design, materials, and manufacture.

I don't know the official stats, but it's a safe guess that total production for all Lenco turntables is well into six figures. Some of those models had only a flimsy sheet-metal platter—as with the Lencos that were used to make the Keith Monks RCMs, where such a shortcoming matters little—yet one must assume that remaining in the field are literally tens of thousands of so-called "heavy-platter" Lencos: plentiful, affordable, essentially high in quality, and just waiting for the right DIY hobbyist to come along and snap them up.

The missing linkage
This is where Netherlander Peter Reinders comes in: "My first Lenco, which I had when I was eight or nine years old, was an L70 that belonged to my grandfather. But it was many years later that I decided to try a Lenco again, when I bought a secondhand L75, just for fun. I didn't know if it would be very good or not, but I paid only €20. For that price, I'd be happy if it sounded good; if it didn't, well, I would have had a fun afternoon trying to fix it up."

As it happened, that €20 L75 sounded very good: Like other contemporary hobbyists, Reinders was surprised and impressed by the level of musical energy and drive that the combination of high-torque motor and idler wheel uncovered in his records. But he was dismayed by the L75's too-resonant top plate: the structure to which the platter bearing, the idler carrier/speed-change mechanism, and the motor assembly are all attached. Putting to use his professional experience as an industrial designer and his familiarity with CAD software, Reinders set about designing his own top plate and having it laser-cut from stainless steel by an outside firm.

Reinders's idea was to divide the Lenco's structural requirements between two distinctly separate and notably sturdy top plates, which could then be fastened to the plinth of one's choice. The smaller of the two plates supports the Lenco's asynchronous motor—itself contained within a kite-shaped, die-cast cradle that perches on three isolation springs, rather like the subchassis of a Linn LP12—and contains the rectangular opening through which the top-mounted idler makes contact with the motor pulley. The larger top plate supports the platter bearing—which is less substantial than average, though apparently well made—along with the mechanism that both supports the idler carrier and allows it to slide back and forth for coarse or fine adjustments of platter speed.

Naturally enough, in the wake of his success at designing a better top plate, Peter Reinders decided to have a few made for his fellow Lenco enthusiasts. An initial production run of 15, offered via the Internet in 2005, sold out in very little time, and there followed a flurry of e-mails, all asking: Do you have any more? Seemingly overnight, Reinders's hobby evolved into a sideline that he eventually named PTP Audio (for Peter's Top Plates). The PTP Audio plate has become the gold standard in Lenco circles (footnote 2), and Reinders can be thanked for the success of various other small manufacturers who now advertise "PTP-ready" Lenco plinths.

But not everyone who longs for a rebuilt Lenco is interested in doing the work her- or himself—or, as Reinders bluntly puts it, "Sometimes you get an e-mail from someone who wants the plate but doesn't have a clue." For those and other customers who've wished for a turnkey solution, PTP Audio offers for sale two completely finished and ready-to-use turntables: the Solid9, for use with the 9" tonearm of the owner's choice; and the Solid12, designed for 12" arms.

As with the Anatase turntable offered by Oswalds Mill Audio (footnote 3), both PTP players are built with reconditioned components from original heavy-platter Lencos: motors (along with their suspension cradles and wiring blocks), platter bearings, platters, platter mats, idler wheels, and idler-support mechanisms. Reinders cleans and lubricates each motor and platter bearing, replacing worn parts where necessary, and cleans the idler wheel and checks its concentricity—though he's found that a Lenco idler wheel almost never needs resurfacing. He also wraps the idler-support rod with a Teflon-like damping tape, and uses three round rubber belts to help tame the otherwise very lively alloy platter.

All of the above are built into a heavy, solid plinth made of Corian, the polymer-plus-mineral compound used to make kitchen counters and other such things. For the Solid9 and Solid12, channels for wiring and mechanical linkage are CNC-machined into a rectangular sheet of Corian, as are openings for a bolt-in circular tonearm board (also of Corian) and for the PTP top plate itself, to which all of the reconditioned Lenco components are fastened. While the original Lenco turntables had a mechanism that prevented contact between platter and idler when the player was not in use (it was mechanically linked to the On/Off switch), Reinders omits that from his 'tables, in what he describes as an effort "to maximize contact between plinth and top plate and to avoid any possible rattles. Most idler wheels don't suffer at all. After hundreds of PTP projects all over the world, I can safely say it is not a problem." The thinness of the Lenco idler, compared to most other idler wheels, may well add to its resilience in that regard.

Footnote 2: PTP Audio, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Web: www.ptpaudio.com

Footnote 3: The OMA Anatase uses its own platter bearing and idler mechanism in concert with the Lenco motor and platter.

Yet another quality that distinguishes the performing from the recorded arts occurred to me only recently: I think the average listener tends to approach the art of live music with a more open mind—opened, that is, to the myriad emotional, intellectual, even spiritual possibilities contained within any performance. That was hammered home during a recent trip, with John Atkinson, to the Metropolitan Opera, for a performance of Wagner's Parsifal. The beautifully realized and decidedly contemporary production—surely no one had ever seen a Parsifal such as this—affected me in ways I couldn't have expected. It was my impression that others in the room felt the same.

But listeners regard recordings rather differently. Subconsciously, at least, we think of a good record as a sort of a pill, one that we hope will produce the same, desired effect every time we take it. (And when that favored record fails to elicit the beloved effect . . . well, then, there must be something wrong with the playback gear, mustn't there?)

That axiom has a similarly recent—and remarkable—touchstone in my memory. Until now, I've found precious few LPs that work consistently well at much of anything; most are the vinyl equivalents of Benadryl, leaving me sleepy on some occasions, agitated on others.

Now I've found a more perfect pill. Sadly, it is the most expensive record in my collection (footnote 1). Happily, it is also, by far, the best, by any definition of the word that one could choose. That record is a new LP (ERC001), from a new reissue house called the Electric Recording Company (footnote 2), of a mono recording made by EMI in 1954: the Transylvania-born violinist Johanna Martzy, playing J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1001–1006. (You get the six works if you buy all three of ERC's Martzy LPs.)

Johanna Martzy (1924–1979), a player of considerable but not epochal talent, performed for the tape neither very slowly nor very briskly. At times she seems to lean toward the latter, but I think that's just the sheer momentum of a player who not only knows but actually understands the score she's playing. The recording space—at Abbey Road Studios—isn't the least bit sterile, and there appears to be a generous amount of space between instrument and microphone. Martzy's tone is good but not great: a bit dark overall, but not terribly rich per se, and at some moments actually a bit hard. Her vibrato is generous but not schmaltzy, her intonation is damn near perfect. Perhaps most crucial, Martzy approaches the Bach with a certain severity, suggesting not so much sterility as correctness. There isn't much lilt in even the liveliest of the dances: The performance seems bent on building a cathedral rather than plaiting daisies.

The recording manages, like none other in my experience, to communicate the nearly indescribable gravitas of the performance. Somehow, whether by luck or design, there is inscribed on this LP an unlikely yet perfect combination of room sound, spatial presence, tone, and sheer emotional intensity, all working together to create an eerie and beautiful and almost spiritual effect. Every time I play this record, I am struck, unsubtly, by the impression that Johanna Martzy, 34 years dead, is alive in the room with me. It is the most consistently moving, stirring, and ultimately real record I've ever heard. It is indeed a drug, manufactured to seemingly unparalleled standards of consistency.

Or, as I said to the empty room about two minutes into my first audition of the Sonata 1 in g: Mother of God . . .

The first cut
"The Martzy is slightly hypnotic, isn't it? Not too romantic, not too technical . . ."

So said the proprietor of the Electric Recording Company, a 46-year-old Londoner named Pete Hutchison. In 1991, Hutchison and a friend started an independent label called Peacefrog Records, which specializes in contemporary music. Peacefrog has enjoyed success with a number of recording artists, including the Swedish electronica band Little Dragon and the engagingly artsy cover act Nouvelle Vague, but Hutchison—who inherited from his parents a love for classical music and a deep respect for the art of serious listening—eventually decided to form a new label of his own, dedicated to reissuing some of the rarest titles of the 20th century.

"When I started collecting records, 20-odd years ago, I started by buying reissues," Hutchison said. "But sometimes a friend would have the original, and whenever I'd hear such a thing, my reaction was: 'Wow, that's so different—and better!'"

Once he'd delved into the field, Hutchison concluded that other reissue companies fail to capture the sounds of monophonic LPs in particular, largely because those companies have failed to apply the same technology that was used to create the originals: more sad evidence of the Good enough is good enough attitude that prevails among contemporary recording engineers. Thus began an unusually expensive and time-consuming effort to equip a studio for faithfully re-creating the sounds of the world's most collectible classical records.

Working with former IBC Studios mastering engineer and current Abbey Road technical consultant Sean Davies and other specialists, Hutchison located and acquired a roomful of the most-sought-after studio gear from the 1950s and '60s, including a Lyrec TR18 mastering station with Lyrec SV8 lathe, a Neumann VMS 70 lathe, an Ortofon DS522 mono cutter head, an Ortofon DSS731 stereo cutter head, a rare EMI BTR2 (the monophonic British Tape Recorder that was used to make the Beatles' earliest commercial recordings), and other similarly expensive devices. Then, in early 2011, they began the even more expensive task of returning all of that equipment to as-new condition. "The mono lathe had been in Romania," Hutchison said, "but we needed to get the mono cutter heads repaired, and there's only one man in the world who can really do that, a gentleman in Italy. The Lyrec lathe had been sitting in a garage for two years, and was thoroughly rusty. Restoring that to perfect condition was a very long process." Fortunately, Sean Davies, now in his 70s, has for years maintained a collection of schematics and spare parts that most vintage enthusiasts would envy.

As Hutchison sees it, "Any record from that period, if you want to hear it right, the mastering has to be consistent with its era. And the fact is, records cut with a stereo cutter, operating in mono, just won't be the same. The groove looks different, because it is different. Our records sound the way they do because we use a true mono cutter head, and there isn't one single transistor anywhere in our circuitry. No one else can really make that claim.

"We also went through three pressing plants to get the best sound: Given the extremes we'd gone through by then, there was no other way. We started in the UK, then moved to a company in Holland, and one in Germany after that. That was a real learning curve—among other things, we learned that 180gm vinyl is not always best on certain pressing machines—and we eventually went back to Holland, where we have had the best results."

Of course, before an exceptional LP can be made, one must have in hand an exceptional tape—and in the case of Johanna Martzy's historic Bach recordings, Pete Hutchison claims a distinct advantage: "I have a contemporary label that's distributed by EMI; that helped give me access to the EMI titles. The [Martzy] tapes have been in the EMI archives all this time. They'd been reissued on LP before, on the Coup d'Archet label (footnote 3), but [not in] a real mono cut on all valve gear."

Record highs
That brings us to the not-insignificant matter of packaging: a pitfall for even those companies with the greatest resources. (As you'll recall from the March 2013 "Listening," my disappointment with the mediocre sound of the recent boxed set of Beatles LPs was compounded by Apple's practice of scanning—less than expertly—the artwork from the UK versions of those albums while using the construction and heavy-gauge card stock typical of contemporary US vinyl releases.) In what appears to be a first, the Electric Recording Co. has taken the extraordinary step of mating a historically correct approach to record mastering with a historically correct approach to their packaging.

Footnote 2: The Electric Recording Company, PO Box 38171, London W10 5WU, England, UK. Fax: (44) 207-575-3047. Web: www.theelectricrecordingco.com.

Footnote 3: These recordings have also been reissued as 2-CD set, Testament 1467, which lists for $41.98 and which ArkivMusic sells for $36.99—Ed.

What isn't easy is performing some of the tasks that make writing worth reading. My least favorite of those is receiving equipment samples that are too large or too heavy for UPS and FedEx: Few things strike greater fear in my heart than having a tractor-trailer driver call me from his cell phone, saying he's blocking traffic at the bottom of my driveway and wants to know how to reach my house—and, by the way, his liftgate is broken and he's not responsible for getting this 300-lb crate out of the truck and through my front door. (My narrow, hilly, 1000'-long driveway and its overhanging cherry trees seemed charming when I bought the place; little did I dream.) Yet it's undeniably true that big, heavy things can be a great deal of fun to read about, so I carry on.

Other difficult tasks are comparatively pleasant. I don't really mind setting up loudspeakers—even the ones I can scarcely move on my own—if only because the rewards of getting things right are so gratifying. And, more than almost anything else, I do enjoy installing and setting up tonearms, especially when the project involves making a tonearm board or plinth on my own.

So it was this past spring, when I was given the opportunity to write about the Ikeda IT-407 tonearm ($6500), which was designed and built by the 84-year-old Isamu Ikeda. Way back in 1967, Ikeda-san founded Fidelity Research, a celebrated Japanese firm that left its mark on the world of phonography with its FR-64 series of tonearms and FR-1 and MC-202 cartridges. (One could say that Isamu Ikeda has left another, more personal mark, inasmuch as many of Japan's well-known cartridge builders have served him as apprentices.) In 1985, as the first shadows of the passing Compact Disc were cast upon the marketplace, the plug was pulled on Fidelity Research—yet Ikeda-san wasn't idle for long: By 1986 he had founded Ikeda Sound Labs, specializing in low-compliance moving-coil cartridges and high-mass, transcription-length tonearms. Which are wonderful things, indeed.

My recent Ikeda experience was occasioned by a change in distribution: After 27 years of patchy representation in the US, the products of Ikeda Sound Labs are now imported by Beauty of Sound, located just 90 minutes from me, in the Albany suburb of East Greenbush, New York. A well-traveled sample of the IT-407—an interesting model number for a tonearm with an effective length of 307mm—reached me while the snow was still on the ground.

Unpacking
The Ikeda tonearm was a delight from the start—defined, for my purposes, as the morning when I made for it a simple armboard of alder wood. (I wanted to use the Ikeda on my 1961 Thorens TD 124, but lacked a spare blank board with the extra real estate required for a 12" arm.) With the newly made board in place on my Thorens, I plotted the recommended spindle-to-pivot distance of 295mm, then returned to my workshop to drill the required mounting hole—which, at 31mm, is considerably larger than most such things.

The very substantial IT-407 would seem to demand no less: Its columnar support pillar is fully 25mm in diameter, and while the Ikeda's 10mm-diameter armtube isn't any thicker than average, it is made of stainless steel instead of the far more common aluminum. With its 35gm moving mass and a counterweight that proved too heavy for my 8.5gm Yamamoto ebony headshell—the latter used with any cartridge on hand—this is clearly not a tonearm for owners of high-compliance phono pickups.

The Ikeda is remarkable for more than just mass: Although its physical design appears solidly smooth and pleasantly unfussy, the arm offers more than usual in the way of setup and adjustment features: spring-actuated dynamic tracking force, which is calibrated and easily set for downforces of up to 5gm; a calibrated and adjustable falling-weight antiskating mechanism; an adjustable lift-lower platform, mated with Ikeda's trademark spherical cueing knob; a beautifully made headshell (of appropriate mass) that's easily adjusted for overhang, offset angle, and, especially, azimuth; and, calibrated for vertical tracking angle (VTA), an arm pillar whose relative height is reasonably easy to adjust.

That ease of adjustment is due in no small part to the IT-407's very solid mounting collet, which, in the manner of the EMT 997 and one or two other tonearms of my acquaintance, clinches the arm pillar with two locking screws instead of one. Moreover, said screws are hefty nylon-tipped things, with large knurled knobs for those of us who don't always have an Allen wrench within reach of one hand at the moment we're grasping a perfectly adjusted arm pillar with the other. As with Fidelity Research arms of yore, the locking nut that holds the arm-mount collet in place from underneath the board is machined with two diametrically opposed holes; these accept a pair of metal studs that, when used together, serve as a very effective wrench. (Naim Audio—whose founder, the late Julian Vereker, was a Fidelity Research fan—took a similar approach in the mounting scheme for their Aro tonearm.)

Thus did I fasten my review sample of the IT-407 to its newly made board, the latter overhanging the entire right-hand side of my Thorens. I re-leveled the turntable to compensate for the change in weight distribution, then added the cartridge and headshell at one end of the armtube and the remarkably heavy counterweight at the other. With the cartridge near the middle of its overhang-adjustment range and the counterweight's locking screw left just a bit loose—with Ikeda's blessing, per their good installation manual—I set the tracking-force control to "0" and adjusted the counterweight until the arm was perfectly balanced, in which state it was uncommonly stable.

Balancing the IT-407 in both horizontal and vertical planes was made easier than usual by a refinement in the arm's antiskating system: a precisely machined thread-and-weight mechanism that is itself mounted to a separate outrigger, the whole of which can be adjusted to sit nearer or farther from the arm pivot, as desired. The axle at the heart of the antiskating system, minus its falling weight, can thus be adjusted to achieve a neutral setting at which the arm doesn't move in either direction; this not only guarantees the system's accuracy once the calibrated weight is installed, it also makes possible better performance in the lateral plane for the hobbyist whose turntable can't itself be leveled.

With the IT-407 in perfect balance, and with its downforce still set to "0," it was easy to observe the quality of the arm's stainless-steel bearings, which support the vertical pivot axle at both ends. (In its predecessor, the Fidelity Research F-64, only one side was supported.) I gently applied a narrow strip of lightweight paper to the stylus tip, noting from the deflection of the strip how little force was required to displace the arm in either plane—and how readily the arm returned to precisely the same vertical position, every time.

An adjustable spring inside the Ikeda's vertical bearing housing provides the arm's dynamic tracking force: an approach that, in my experience, results in a livelier, more impactful sound than is available from designs where stylus pressure is applied by merely unbalancing the arm, fore to aft. As near as I could tell, the Ikeda's calibration was accurate throughout its range of 0–5gm (my reference Technics strain gauge extends to only 3gm), but the smooth and generously sized adjustment wheel, with detents at every quarter-gram increment above 0.5gm, was an unambiguous delight to use.

Finally, to judge the Ikeda's alignability, I sat down with the Ikeda tonearm, a few cartridges, and my DB System's DB-10 protractor—a $49 accessory that Stephen Mejias has accurately described as Jesus's protractor of choice. As I mentioned earlier, the very low-mass Yamamoto headshell proved incompatible with so massive a tonearm, so I relied on the long version of Ikeda's own metal headshell (footnote 1), which allowed me to achieve perfect Baerwald alignment (footnote 2) with every standard-mount cartridge I tried. In every case, however, I had to increase the offset angle by rotating the cartridge body clockwise by at least a couple of degrees (as viewed from above).

That also held true when I tried fitting the EMT and Ortofon pickup heads in my collection. Noting that the IT-407 is designed for use with G-style as opposed to A-style pickup heads (the former exhibiting a stylus-tip-to-collet distance of 52mm, the latter a more compact 30mm), I supplemented my A-style samples with Ortofon's APJ-1 adapter ($99), a length-enhancing accessory whose most astonishing characteristic may be its obscurity among audiophiles. In every case, a bit more offset would have been required for good alignment, suggesting that the Ikeda arm's geometry is slightly lacking in that regard. Because offset is easy to adjust when setting up a standard-mount cartridge, that's no big deal; it becomes a flaw only with fixed-offset pickup heads. Before choosing an Ikeda for use with one of the latter, the user should have in place some means of adjusting—particularly of increasing—its spindle-to-pivot distance, using a separate arm support, an articulated armboard (à la the LignoLab plinth), or other such approach. (Generally speaking, a smaller degree of offset correlates with a smaller degree of overhang, neither of which can be accomplished without locating the tonearm's pivot point a greater-than-average distance from the record spindle.)

Tracking
Perhaps more than most tonearms, the Ikeda IT-407 is one of those hi-fi products that compels its user to just sit back and gaze at the thing: a beautifully rounded construction of polished chrome and stainless steel that appears to be at once both new and old. Isamu Ikeda suggests that its generous curves are "not only for aesthetics: The lack of any sharp edges is employed so that no vibrations or resonances can be stored in the arm."

Footnote 2: See Keith Howard's article on tonearm geometry.

The Vittora is designed and built by Greg Roberts (footnote 1), a longtime audio enthusiast who bought his first pair of Klipsch La Scala loudspeakers when he was 14. (He has owned a number of pairs of Klipschorns in the years since, having settled on an especially nice-looking set from 1967.) A woodworker by training and a homebuilder by trade, Roberts began, in 2001, to offer his services as a commercial restorer of Klipsch's "heritage" products: the Klipschorn, the Belle Klipsch, the La Scala, and the Heresy. In time, restoration turned to modification, as Roberts developed a midrange horn and other components to improve the performance of classic Klipsches that hadn't always been built to perfectionist standards. Not long after that, Roberts decided to incorporate what he'd learned into a completely new, if unabashedly Klipschian, loudspeaker of his own design. Thus, over several years, did Volti Audio and the Vittora loudspeaker come into being.

The Vittora is a three-way, fully horn-loaded loudspeaker in two enclosures per channel, both made entirely of Baltic birch plywood. The bass cabinet is a single-fold bifurcated horn in which a rear-facing woofer fires into a splitter that, according to Roberts, took considerable time to develop—as did the shape of the bass horn: "The size of the mouth is a big determinant for lower bass: It is what it is," he says. "But I found that upper bass was something I had control over, and I used cheap OSB [oriented-strand board] to build multiple prototypes." The result is a design in which the sides of the enclosure—and thus one surface along each of two paths—are curved. The high-sensitivity, 15" bass driver has a stiffly suspended paper cone—Roberts estimates its Q as approximately 0.3—with a free-air resonance in the neighborhood of 40Hz.

The cabinet's curve is repeated in the sides of the upper enclosure, which houses the Vittora's midrange and treble horns, both of which are derived from Roberts's modifications of Klipschorns. The rectangular midrange horn, made of plywood and bendable hardwood, has a tractrix flare, and is driven by a 2" compression driver (a BMS 4592) with a phenolic diaphragm. The elliptical treble horn is made of composite and is driven by a 1" compression driver with an aluminum diaphragm. The two horns fit side by side, the latter secured in an opening that Roberts designed into the former.

The upper enclosure also contains the Vittora's crossover network, which is user-adjustable for treble output: By substituting different preassembled resistor modules—which work within the Vittora's capacitor- and autoformer-based network to create different L-pad configurations—the owner can suit room or taste by raising or lowering the tweeter's output across its operating range, from 6kHz up. The crossover network is accessed through a panel on the back of the upper cabinet, and the resistor modules are connected with integral gold-plated spade lugs, making soldering unnecessary. Roberts says that the bass portion of the crossover also includes an adjustable contour filter—a notch filter, really—that helps flatten out a known response peak.

The Volti Vittora is built in a shop—as opposed to a garage, a driveway, or somebody's mother's basement—solely dedicated to the production of loudspeakers and loudspeaker components, and which Roberts has equipped with state-of-the-art power tools and an air-filtration system. Cutting and shaping are done with high-tech European table saws and bandsaws. Wooden parts are bent to shape in a vacuum-bag system—also used to apply veneer—and catalyzed polymer finishes are applied in a separate, room-sized spraybooth. The build quality of my review pair, finished in bosse cedar, equals that of the finest American loudspeaker cabinetry I've seen, DeVore Fidelity and Thiel Audio included. Roberts makes his own wooden cabinet feet, and even irons and applies his own vintage-style grillework—it all contributes to one of the best-built audio products I've had in my home. Forgive the ham-fisted cliché, but even my wife, who was at first put off by the idea of a speaker that takes up more space than a front-loading clothes-dryer, was impressed.

It rained. Of course.
Janet was also impressed with Vittora's sound, going so far as to call it the best horn speaker she's heard. But that's getting ahead of myself—before any listening got done, Greg Roberts and I had to get the Vittoras through the door, which meant that we uncrated them in my driveway. It rained. Of course.

The crates themselves were well made, each containing a single channel's bottom and top enclosures, separated from one another with sheets of sturdy foam. Carrying inside the 60-lb top enclosures wasn't too terrible, but the 127-lb bottom enclosures gave us a spot of trouble on the way up to my porch, especially as the enclosed stairway is 31" wide and the uncrated enclosure's depth (its smallest dimension) is 29". A few knuckles were scraped that day, a few curses cursed.

Once inside, the setting-up was fairly easy. Roberts shares my preference for using felt pads on the bottoms of his loudspeaker feet (provisions exist for those who endure in preferring spikes), so the heavy lower enclosures were easy to slide on my hardwood floors. The upper enclosures are fitted with spikes, the points of which correspond with dimpled discs atop the bottom cabinets; fitting together the two enclosures is a two-person job, but neither person need be terribly clever or strong, merely possessed of good depth perception. (I scarcely filled the bill.) In order for me to have the complete Vittora experience, Roberts also brought a matching sample of its optional subwoofer ($2900 without its corresponding Marchand amplifier/crossover), beautifully finished in the same bosse-cedar veneer. That said, we began our fine-tuning and our first few hours of listening without it.

The Vittoras
Bass extension with the Vittoras alone (Greg Roberts says they reach down to 50Hz, in-room) was superb from the get-go: The bass horn loaded the room exceptionally well, with no egregious dead zones. Our work was confined to selecting the optimal distances between the speakers and the front and side walls; we noted, without surprise, that when those two dimensions were too similar, bass notes lost some of their distinctness of pitch and clarity. Our best results were had with the cabinets only a few inches from their respective sidewalls, and with about 26" between the back of each cabinet and the wall behind it. A gentle to moderate amount of toe-in was preferred, the handed enclosures arranged so that their treble horns were on the outside edges of the midrange horns.

At the far end of my room, driven by the 25W Shindo Corton-Charlemagne amplifiers, the Vittoras sounded nothing short of wonderful. Their trebles were smoother and altogether softer than those of my metal-horned Altec Valencias, while their bass range had the same touchtone, vintage magic: a little less sharp and a little more colorful than the Altecs, and just as big, just as full of impact and nuance and feeling.

I would go a step further: Whatever the subject, reviewing should be temporarily off-limits to people who are in a bad mood. I'm reminded of that dictum by my recent experience with a product called the String Theory Woody, a lovingly made tonearm designed and built by engineer Peter Riggle (not to be confused with Steve Diggle, lead guitarist for the excellent English band the Buzzcocks, whom I had the pleasure of seeing in their first New York show). The Woody tonearm from Pete Riggle Audio ($1600 as supplied with headshells and counterweights to suit one range of cartridge characteristics; extra parts available at extra cost, footnote 1) is a fascinating product, but its installation, in particular, should not be approached when one is feeling grouchy.

The quality that makes the Woody mildly exasperating is also one that makes it worthwhile: The Woody, which looks like a cross between the original Grado tonearm and an astrolabe, has to be the most adjustable tonearm one can buy. The point being: The installation and setup challenges posed by the Woody's adjustability are daunting in the extreme—or so they were for me: At a point very early in my time with the Woody, while wrestling with its 39 pages of instructions and illustrations and the 20-plus auxiliary parts that were packaged with the tonearm itself, I said Screw it! so loudly that I embarrassed even myself.

Yet once the user is both in the mood to avail himself of the arm's many adjustments and well versed in the need for same, it's hard not to appreciate the Woody. In fact, my most rapturously happy setup moment with the Woody came just a couple of hours after my Screw it! moment. As you surely know, the design of any pivoted tonearm takes into account a precise, set distance beyond which the stylus tip of an installed cartridge must extend past the record spindle of the associated turntable, determined by that tonearm's effective length; that amount of overhang, taken in accordance with an equally precise, set degree of cartridge offset angle, is what allows that arm and cartridge to function with as little tracing-error distortion as possible. Pete Riggle is one of the very few tonearm manufacturers with the foresight to supply with his arm a simple overhang gauge. As I discovered, by using that gauge to set overhang early in the setup process, one needs to expend very little time and effort later on. After less than a minute of dialing in the offset angle, my cartridge was perfectly aligned, my good mood restored.

Variations
The Pete Riggle Audio Woody is a unipivot tonearm, one whose single bearing point is determined not with a connective structure (in the manner of the seminal Gray 108, the Naim Aro, or any number of other such things), but with a small bit of string and a generous reliance on gravity—as in the long-standing Well Tempered Tonearm and the more sophisticated designs of Frank Schröder. The Woody's armwand is suspended from a rigid support by four short, thin strands of what Riggle describes only as "a space-age material." The structure to which these filaments are attached is in fact a knurled brass knob, turnable from above, with which the user adds antiskating by creating a twist in the bundle of threads; once the desired force has been applied—the manual recommends using an ungrooved record for this—the uncalibrated knob is locked into position with a brass setscrew.

Also in common with the Well Tempered and Schröder (footnote 2) tonearms, the Woody wand isn't just free to dangle, jerkily, but is damped with a restorative force. On the wand's underside, directly opposite the point of suspension, a short aluminum channel of rectangular cross section is rigidly attached; this is submerged within a small Delrin cup filled with a thick damping oil. A short rod, centered within and apparently integral to the cup, fits within the straight-sided channel, which is said to be lined with Teflon.

On my 9" review sample of the Woody, the square-cross-section armwand itself—which is tapered from rear to front—was indeed approximately 9" long, the working bits at both ends being made up of various metal fittings. Screwed into the rear is a round steel rod meant to accept one of the two adjustable counterweights supplied, their different masses meant to suit different cartridges. The front of the arm is fitted with a metal Headshell Adjuster Plate: a 2.25"-long piece with a single slot, this to accept the single screw that holds in place the metal headshell plate itself (to which the phono cartridge is bolted, of course). That the headshell adjuster plate is slender and the headshell spare are boons to easy cartridge alignment.

Physical support for the Woody is provided by a tonearm mount that Riggle refers to as the VTAF (Vertical Tracking Angle on the Fly), and which is available separately as an accessory for use with Rega RB300 tonearms and their derivatives. Intended to allow users to adjust tonearm height during record play, the VTAF uses an arm-support pillar machined with an extremely fine thread (footnote 3); a round, oversize nut, knurled on its outer edge and coated with Teflon on its lowermost surface; and a flanged bronze mounting sleeve for the tonearm board in which the arm pillar loosely rests.

The aforementioned damping cup isn't fastened rigidly to the arm's main support structure, but rather is attached to a pivoting lever made of brass, which Riggle refers to as the AZOF (Azimuth On the Fly). By moving that lever one way or the other, the user tilts the damping cup either toward or away from the record spindle. This, in turn, forces a change of position on the straight-sided channel that rides within the damping cup—thus rotating the wand itself and, of course, the cartridge. Once changes in azimuth have been thus effected with the AZOF lever, the user is said to have it within his power to fine-tune the armwand's balance with a long brass screw—terminated at both ends with brass thumb-nuts—that runs straight through the wand, acting not unlike a tightrope walker's pole. To achieve the desired results, the user simply grabs the Woody's left and right nuts and simultaneously twists them.

The structure that supports the damping cup extends toward the front of the arm, forming a base for both a cueing mechanism of the usual sort and a magnetic armrest, the latter of which attracts and holds a small steel staple at the bottom of the armtube (which itself resembles the hook keeper on a fly rod). Because the Woody's basic structure fits only loosely into Riggle's VTAF arm mount—and would be free to rotate if left unimpeded—the design also includes a separate VTAF Guide Assembly: a circular brass plate bolted to the armboard and fitted with a pair of posts that limit the arm structure's travel.

Other notable details include a subminiature bubble level on the Headshell Adjuster Plate; breakless, single-run wiring from cartridge clips to RCA plugs; and, on the mahogany armwand, a French-polish finish—a traditional luthiery technique in which thin coats of shellac are applied by hand with a cotton pad called a tampon. Because Pete Riggle aims for a total arm-plus-cartridge resonance of 8Hz, and because the Woody, like most commercial tonearms, will presumably be used in the field with cartridges of varying compliance, he supplies with each arm a selection of different headshells, Headshell Adjuster Plates, and other bits of hardware, made from materials of distinctly different densities (brass and aluminum being the ones most commonly used); once informed of the user's cartridge choices, Riggle then supplies a chart advising the combination of parts required for each. (Woodys are available in virtually any effective length from 9" to 16", yet variations in the length of the wooden wand have little effect on the arm's effective mass.) Riggle also supplies a packet of tiny brass shims for use in the event of insufficient clearance between the tapered armwand and the spinning record: This ensures that the pickup's rear end will still be at the correct angle when the Woody

Footnote 2: Damping in the altogether more advanced Schröder arm is accomplished not with goo but with magnetism.

Footnote 3: For owners of Rega tonearms, this is accomplished with a tubular sleeve, with threads on the inside that mate with the Rega's own threaded pillar.

The same applies to those audio designers whose craft has approached the level of art. The products of Ken Shindo, Tim de Paravicini, Jean Constant Verdier, J.C. Morrison, Junji Kimura, Don Garber, Denis Morecroft, and a handful of others have all elicited that response—yet none more than the late Hiroyasu Kondo. His Audio Note Ongaku amplifier of 1989 woke the world to a number of possibilities: that a successful commercial amplifier could be designed to operate in single-ended mode; that it could be designed around new-old-stock (NOS) power tubes (footnote 1); that it could provide less than 30Wpc of output power; that it could forgo printed-circuit boards in favor of point-to-point wiring; that it could contain not a single solid-state component; that it could be shockingly expensive.

I didn't hear an original Ongaku until around 1996, by which time the burgeoning single-ended-triode movement had adopted its designer as an unofficial firebrand: understandable, I suppose, but to restrict the Kondo legacy to just one output-circuit variation is to miss the point. For one thing, as revealed in a 1996 interview with former Stereophile contributor Jonathan Scull, Kondo-san also designed and built amplifiers using push-pull architecture, the merits of which, "when properly executed," he endorsed. For another, it seems that, more than any matter of circuit architecture, Kondo's greater concern was to design and manufacture every component part used in his products, down to making his own capacitors by hand, and creating a custom die for the extrusion of his silver wiring.

Those things were brought to mind by two relatively new products in the Kondo line: the Overture integrated amplifier ($33,900) and the GE-1 phono preamplifier ($12,900). Both were designed by Katsura Hirokawa and tuned by Ashizawa Masaki, the latter of whom joined the company in 1990, as Kondo-san's apprentice. Masaki-san is now the CEO of Kondo Audio Note Co., Ltd. in Japan (footnote 2), which remains in the hands of the founder's family. Owing to a change in US distribution, from the former distributor to New York City–based Rhapsody Music & Cinema, the Overture and GE-1 recently spent two months in my system: the first new Kondo products I've experienced at home in a number of years (footnote 3).

Made of stone-ah
Although it appears modestly sized in the photos on Kondo's website—as would virtually anything when viewed alongside the 75-lb Ongaku—the Overture integrated amplifier is something of a beast in person, measuring nearly 17" deep and weighing over 45 lbs: almost too much for even the top shelf of my Box Furniture equipment rack. The sturdy, meticulously crafted chassis, made from a combination of steel, brass, and aluminum pieces, is described by Ashizawa Masaki as "expensive and complicated, but very useful for sound tuning." Also contributing to the Overture's heft are its custom-wound Tango power transformer and output transformers—among the amplifier's relatively few parts that aren't made in-house.

After removing the Overture's top plate—and admiring the all-too-rare beauty of a five-figure audio product whose casework is so well engineered that all of the construction bolts and their threaded holes line up perfectly, and whose chassis does not flex with the weight of the parts within—I couldn't help being impressed with the appearance of the handmade silver-foil capacitors used in the signal path. Each is marked with its precise value, along with the name of the technician who made it and the date of its manufacture. The choke coils and the smaller transformers are also the company's own, as are all of the internal hookup wires. The tantalum resistors, although made at another facility (using Kondo's solid silver wire as leads), are a proprietary Kondo design, and are individually measured and sorted in-house for consistency. The silver input and output connectors, too, are Kondo's own design, made to their specifications.

Adjacent to the audio-signal circuitry, extending beyond the range of the tubes themselves, is another Kondo signature: a ground plane made from pure, solid copper. The present-day manufacturer of Kondo products extols the use of solid copper for its RFI resistance and good mechanical grounding properties; Hiroyasu Kondo, in his writings and conversations, suggested that the electrical current meant to mimic music sounds best when comprising electrons drawn from copper and silver. (Again I'm reminded of the dictum that audio devices tend to sound like the materials from which they're made—something I learned from writer Herb Reichert, and that Herb learned while working for Audio Note.)

The Overture's volume potentiometer could be regarded as an off-the-shelf part, assuming the shelf in question is sturdier than average. The Alps HQPro, which is completely encased in a precision-machined brass housing, would be too large to fit inside some of the high-end preamps I've owned. (Although the Japanese Alps company appears to aim the HQPro series at their home market only, I found the website of a Polish electronics distributor that offers the Overture's 100k ohm version for the equivalent of $550.) But the Overture's Russian-made tubes—two EL34 output pentodes, one 6072, and one 12BH7 per channel—really are off the shelf, having been supplied by Electro-Harmonix, the company that began life making such guitar pedals as the Big Muff „ and Small Stone. These tubes may seem less tony than the rare, NOS tubes supplied by other amplifier makers, but I can vouch for at least the Electro-Harmonix 6072 dual-triodes used as the Overture's input tubes, which sound uniquely clear and noise-free in the input sections of my Shindo Corton-Charlemagne monoblocks (footnote 4).

Speaking of the Corton-Charlemagne, the Kondo Overture shares with that amp its use of a class-A, Ultralinear, push-pull output circuit with minimal (3dB) global feedback, executed by Kondo with split-primary output transformers custom-wound by Tango. According to Ashizawa Masaki, an Ultralinear circuit was chosen in order to ensure "reasonable output power, [while] at the same time we have to reproduce smooth tonal character, like a triode." A fixed-bias circuit was chosen to avoid the need for high-power-handling cathode resistors: "Good-sounding ones are rare," according to Masaki-san, who also points to Kondo's proprietary Constant-Current Bias (CCB) circuit, wherein the music signal is spared from passing through the circuitry used for setting bias voltage. Maintaining an appropriate relationship between the music signal and the circuitry for the amplifier's operating voltages is also stressed throughout the Overture's power supply, where Masaki-san says that circuit-layout techniques are critical.

The 32Wpc Overture isn't big on creature comforts, lacking a balance control, a mono switch, and, as one might guess from its pairing with the Kondo GE-1, a phono stage. But it does offer four pairs of line-level inputs—selectable by means of a rotary switch with an unusually solid feel—and a choice of 4 or 8 ohm output sockets. Notably, the Overture also offers freedom from that most needless of all extra-cost accessories, the remote control. The Overture comes standard with the company's ACz Avocado silver AC cord, which sells separately for $2450.

With regard to the Kondo Overture's build quality, I can say only that I've never seen a more meticulously constructed amplifier, be it tubed or solid-state, from any manufacturer. The attention to detail and the sheer level of craftsmanship displayed in the Overture are nothing less than staggering.

The same construction quality, as well as the same silver wiring, handmade capacitors, bespoke resistors, copper ground plane, and tuned, multi-metal chassis, are seen in the Kondo GE-1, a moving-magnet (34dB of gain) phono preamplifier with separate, switchable input pairs for two phono pickups. The GE-1 uses three of the aforementioned Electro-Harmonix 6072 dual-triode tubes, which provide a two-stage, zero-feedback gain circuit and a cathode-follower final stage for low output impedance. At the other end of the GE-1, an input-impedance selector switch—with choices of 20, 50, and 100k ohms—offers the user a non–signal-degrading means of tailoring response in the face of turntable rumble or other system anomalies. The power supply of the GE-1 is built around an original Kondo cut-core transformer and a 6X4 rectifier tube, with a solid-state (TO3 transistor–based) supply for the heater circuits. The stock AC cord is Kondo's ACc copper, which sells separately for $1150/1.75m.

Footnote 2: There is inevitable confusion between two companies sharing the same name. Audio Note in Japan, whose Kondo Overture and GE-1 are reviewed in this issue's "Listening," is referred to as Kondo Audio Note; Audio Note in the UK, which is no longer connected with the Japanese company, is run by Peter Qvortrup.—Ed.

Footnote 3: Kondo Audio Note Co. Ltd., 242 Shimohirama Saiwai Kawasaki, Kanagawa 212-0053, Japan. Tel: (81) 44-520-3150. Fax: (81) 44-555-8350. Web: www.audionote.co.jp. US distributor: Rhapsody Music & Cinema, 27 W. 24th Street, Suite 506, New York, NY 10010. Tel: (212) 229-1842. Web: www.rhapsodycinema.com.

Footnote 4: The E-H 6072 is available in matched pairs from a number of sources; I bought mine from McShane Design, of Orland Park, Illinois.

Pity the aging perfectionist, the happy diversions of whose younger days—washing records, oiling turntables, leveling equipment racks, cleaning tube pins—have now become hated chores. And this from a man who used to redo his Roksan Xerxes setup every few months, just for "fun."

Sad irony, then, that an interest in mono LPs and shellacs came upon me so late in life, for it is a field in which the experts, among whose number I count God, would have me use different stylus profiles, different tonearm setups, different step-up transformers, and different playback-equalization curves when playing different mono records. I endure in doing the first three, because those things are necessary to both my enjoyment of music and to the preservation of my irreplaceable mono records (footnote 1). But I've never gone terribly far out of my way to fine-tune playback EQ, if only because I find that I'm not nearly as sensitive to lack of tonal accuracy as I am to lack of touch, impact, scale, presence, or drama.

Oh, me of little faith.

Double, double, toil and amplitude
Yet the need for some degree of playback equalization, howsoever unrefined, is a given. Bear in mind that the groove of a non-acoustically recorded record groove is created using an electromagnetic cutter head and played back using an electromagnetic pickup head, devices that convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Remember also that, in all such things, the velocity of the mechanical signal at one end and the amplitude of the electrical signal at the other are directly proportional to one another—or, to put it more simply, as frequency goes up, so must voltage. That law, first described in 1831 by Michael Faraday, poses a challenge to any electrical phonograph: Because every doubling of frequency carries with it a concomitant doubling of voltage, an electromagnetic music-storage system with a 10-octave range would require an electrical range of, say, 1 to 1024V (or 1mV to 1.024V, or what-have you). That's just crazy.

The impracticality of such a wide range is problem enough, and yet the system brings with it a second challenge, of at least equal severity: If one were to use the same electromagnetic system of inscribing a 20Hz tone as a 20,000Hz tone, the disparity in size between the two would be so great that a single groove of useful width could not possibly contain both tones. Besides, the audio industry's ability to make a pickup capable of tracing, without distortion, the enormous groove excursions required for low frequencies and yet still respond to the microscopically small modulations required for the highest frequencies is, now as then, more than a bit doubtful.

Happily, the witches who cackled around the cauldron of the recording industry in the mid-1920s hatched an ingenious scheme: Rather than abandon altogether the notion of a spiral record groove—already made popular by the earlier acoustic Gramophones and Graphophones and Victrolas, whose 2.5-octave range and purely mechanical nature posed no Faradaysical challenges—they decided that, henceforth, electromagnetic cutter heads would be fed signals in which low frequencies are attenuated and high frequencies are boosted, both at the rate of 6dB/octave. Thus driven, those cutter heads could create grooves of usefully small size in which midtones are represented by constant-velocity modulations, yet the bass and treble ranges are transformed into constant-amplitude modulations. Neat.

Everyone left the coven with the same great idea—and went home and implemented it differently. From 1925 through 1953, virtually every manufacturer of phonograph records attenuated the bass and goosed up the highs of the signals driving their cutters (for a while, Victor changed only the lows, leaving everything else at constant velocity), all by the same 6dB rate. But most record labels used different hinge frequencies to define their EQ curves. A technical survey of records from Brunswick, Clef, Columbia, Decca, HMV, Mercury, Okeh, Victor, and dozens of others would reveal over 100 different combinations of hinge frequencies. And because the very concept of high fidelity implies that every cut-and-boost going in requires a complementary boost-and-cut coming out, a tremendous challenge was laid before the makers of playback gear—who, for the most part, ignored it. Of the preamps and integrated amps made during the classic age of the mono LP, surprisingly few can be adjusted for more than just a couple of different curves.

In 1954, as orchestrated by the recently formed Recording Industry Association of America, the world's record labels signed a treaty to end the war against fidelity: They agreed to an RIAA equalization standard that endures today, wherein the bass and treble hinge frequencies are respectively set at 500.5Hz and 2.122kHz (footnote 2). Those of us who listen to modern stereo LPs must, and generally can, trust that our phono stages are designed with the correct RIAA playback EQ.

Yet we remain ill equipped to hear, at their best, the hundreds of millions of mono records that remain on Earth. A handful of pre-RIAA–friendly phono preamplifiers are still being made, two of which—Esoteric Sound's extremely cost-effective Rek-O-Kut Re-Equalizer II ($369) and the all-tube Sentec EQ10 ($2850, footnote 3)—I've discussed in the January 2009 "Listening" column. Both provide adjustable gain to suit a variety of cartridge types, and both offer user-selectable EQ curves, with separate rotary switches for bass boost and treble rolloff.

Enter the Monophonic ($1500, footnote 4), a single-channel, perfectionist-quality phono preamp with a key distinction: It is, as far as I know, the only phono stage in which equalization settings are arrived at not by means of switches but with stepless, continuously variable potentiometers, thus offering far greater potential for fine tuning and ease of use.

Designed and made in Germany by a mono enthusiast named Michael Fehlauer, the Monophonic is a solid-state preamp with gain that's user-selectable (by means of a rear-mounted switch) for moving-coil, high-output moving-coil, and moving-magnet cartridges. (Input-impedance specs for these different settings are not published.) Measuring just 4" wide by 2.5" high by 7" deep (not counting its outboard power supply), the Monophonic is built into a distinctly well-made extruded case with a smooth satin-black finish. The front panel is glossy black methacrylate, adorned only with two barrel-style knobs that wouldn't look out of place on a Gibson Les Paul guitar: bass boost on the left, treble rolloff on the right. Each knob is marked with the numerals 1 through 10, as well as lines that correspond with those numbers and the points midway between them—and the Monophonic comes with a list of suggested settings for the EQ schemes of various record labels, including the modern RIAA standard (which requires the left knob to be set at 5.0 and the right knob at 4.0).

Behind each knob stands a Bourns potentiometer, and elsewhere inside the Monophonic, enjoying pride of place, reside two op-amps, their identifying markings sanded off. There are also two voltage regulators, nine resistors, two diodes, and a bunch of capacitors—all on a notably neat, well-finished board. The Monophonic is an unambiguously modern piece of gear made in an era when PCB stands for printed circuit board, not fish food.

Footnote 2: The RIAA also came up with a third hinge frequency, suggesting that mastering engineers should revert to constant velocity below 50Hz, in order to avoid interference in the form of rumble.

Footnote 3: This was recently replaced with the identically priced and newly stereo-friendly Sentec EQ11, which I have not heard.

Footnote 4: US distributor: Oswalds Mill Audio. Tel: (917) 743-3780. Web: www.oswaldsmillaudio.com

His style of hitchhiking is simple: Step into the path of a moving car and see what happens. Until recently, my own response was one of avoidance and acceleration—to flee, as it were, a shadow (which, as already mentioned, I once suspected him of being). But on a morning last month, as I returned from driving my daughter to her part-time job, I decided it was no longer sensible or even acceptable for me to avoid him. I pulled over, rolled down the passenger-side window, and asked where he was headed. The Old Soldier, who that day looked about 70, replied by opening the door, sitting down, and fastening his seatbelt without prompting—the last an unexpected concession to life in the 21st century.

We exchanged first names and shook hands, and I carried on driving. My passenger asked what I do for a living, and I told him that I write magazine articles. I asked what he does for a living, and he replied, "I'm a collector. I collect old military uniforms and 45rpm records." So much for the mystery of the Old Soldier's anachronistic appearance. And as for the man's interest in records, he spoke for a few minutes, at my urging, about the music he enjoys ("Country and western. The good stuff. Not that new shit. Jesus.") and the reasons for our shared love of vinyl ("I don't have a CD player. Don't want one, either.").

I admit, with shame, that my materialistic streak often surfaces when I meet someone—especially an older someone—who has in abundance those things I covet: vintage guitars, vintage audio gear, vintage books, vintage fly rods, and, of course, vinyl. I've resolved, in recent years, to try harder to banish from my mind all thoughts of material goods when meeting such folks, and to simply enjoy their company; unfortunately, like my record collection itself, my personality is a work in progress.

But on this late-summer morning I scarcely had to try at all: I have no interest whatsoever in 45s. In 59 years of life, 49 of which have been spent as a vinyl buyer, I have accumulated no more than two dozen of the things, and while I appreciate a good one when I hear it, the 7" record is forever in my growing blind spot.

Or so I thought before Tuesday.

Another veteran of vinyl pursuits—an older man whom I've known, through other friends, for about a dozen years—got in touch to say he planned to vacate his Manhattan apartment, and wondered if I could help him dispose of his collection of approximately 1000 classical LPs. The man was convinced he'd have to pay someone to haul away the 20 cartons of vinyl now scattered throughout his tiny home—an impression that, I'm sorry to say, at least one less-than-scrupulous NYC-area record dealer did his best to encourage. I offered to drive down and buy them for as much as I could afford to pay. A deal was struck, and, to the best of my recollection, as I was running out the door, I whispered to Janet that there might soon be 20 more cartons of LPs in our living room. Honest.

The number proved to be fewer than 20: There wasn't enough room in my Volkswagen Tiguan for the last four cartons, which now await my return before winter starts in earnest. And the media proved to be more than just LPs: I spied in one of the cartons a small pile of 78s and, surprisingly, about a dozen 45s. Perhaps, like many record collectors who were active in the 1960s, this gentleman bought the occasional single by the Beatles or the Beach Boys, just for the fun of it? That was the first carton I emptied on my return, and I was surprised to see, at the top of the pile of 45s, the rounded-triangle logo used by Decca during their golden era of Full Frequency Stereophonic Sound (ffss) records. Good grief: I was looking at a 7", 45rpm record of classical music!

The record, which bears the catalog number SEC 5045, is a perfect miniature of an English Decca LP from the early 1960s, right down to the fold-over sleeve and the back-cover ad for the Decca ffss Stereophonic Pick-Up and Arm ("a triumph of British engineering and craftsmanship"!). The music engraved on its two short sides is J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto 2, with Karl Münchinger and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra—a recording that also appeared on a Decca LP (SXL 2126), paired with the rather longer Concerto 5. Unable to contain my curiosity a moment longer, I fired up the hi-fi and was treated to some of the most sublimely clear, colorful, and tactile sound in the Decca catalog. And that's saying something; in addition to showcasing an impressive roster of world-class performing artists, Decca's stereo classical recordings from 1957 through 1967 are simply the best such things ever made, surpassing by a slight margin even the superb products of EMI, and leaving everyone else in the dust (a fitting metaphor in the case of other highly touted records that, to my ears, sound somewhat grungy by comparison).

Having read that Decca stereo LPs of that era were, as a matter of course, mastered at half speed, I wondered if the same might be true of this 45rpm microgroove single. I also wondered if there were any more at home like her. I searched for other numbers in the series, and learned at once that Decca SEC 5044 is 45rpm record of Ravel's Boléro—which, like my Bach single, has as its cover art a photograph of a small bit of pottery, under which appears the series title Classical Miniatures. Other numbers brought up other titles, also containing excerpts from various LPs from Decca's hallowed SXL series—somewhat more expensive things, by comparison. It may be time to expand my collection in a new direction.

Incidentally, my new pile of 45s includes classical titles from other labels, including Columbia, RCA (Jascha Heifetz on the same shade of red vinyl as the 1971 Nazz album Nazz Nazz), Royale (an American label that seems to have specialized in European recordings, also on red vinyl), Disques de l'Oiselet (a French label whose logo suggests a connection with the EMI offshoot l'Oiseau-Lyre), and Cantate, a German label with an apparent passion for publishing the religious works of Heinrich Schütz on 7", 45rpm records. (I can just imagine the parties . . . )

Coffman Labs G-1A preamplifier
Back in the 1980s, when I landed my first job in the audio-industry press, I was surprised to learn how many well-known high-end companies farm out their assembly work to manufacturers of medical equipment. Surprised, but not horrified: After all, if a factory can produce a functioning CT scanner (average price: $200,000), or even a no-frills liposuction aspirator (average price: $2000), how hard could it be to turn out a halfway-decent CD player, or a turntable with a vacuum platter?

I'm reminded of that time-honored relationship by Coffman Labs, a new company (footnote 1) whose founder, Damon Coffman, has served as both CEO and CTO for a prominent West Coast manufacturer of medical electronics. More interesting is the means by which Coffman earned a living while doing his graduate work in physics: as a concert violinist. It's as if an aspiring maker of frankfurters had experience in the interrelated disciplines of the culinary arts, animal husbandry, and highway maintenance: If there's a more perfect background for an audio manufacturer, I can't imagine what it might be.

Coffman Labs' first product is the G-1A preamplifier ($5495), a line stage plus phono stage that uses seven vacuum tubes: a 5AR4 full-wave rectifier plus two each of the 12AX7, 12AU7, and 5687 dual triodes. Because much of his debut product's circuitry is built around vintage parts—including old-style, metal-encased oil capacitors and a new-old-stock (NOS) rotary switch from eastern Europe—Coffman is following Shindo Laboratory's lead in offering the G-1A as a limited-edition product (footnote 2).

Although it lacks a balance control and a mono switch, the Coffman G-1A tempts the hobbyist with other amenities—and it is nothing if not headphone friendly. A rotary output switch allows the user to choose between double pairs of rear-mounted output jacks and the G-1A's front-mounted, ¼" headphone jack, the latter with settings for headphone loads of greater than 100 and less than 75 ohms, and loads that are best driven directly by the preamp's line stage. The output switch also has a position labeled Out, which disconnects all outputs and, at the same time, shorts whichever input is currently in use. (When desired, all inputs can be shunted to ground with a separate Mute control.)

Footnote 2: Coffman Labs and their sole distributor, Echo Audio, say that production of the G-1A will be limited to 500 units—which would, in fact, be a very large run for some companies that don't limit their production. My review sample was No.34.

Audio engineers have been doing those things for ages. Have they improved their craft to the same extent as the people who, over the same period of time, earned their livings making, say, automobiles and pharmaceuticals? I don't know. But if it were possible to spend an entire day driving a new car from 50 years ago, treating diabetes and erectile dysfunction with the treatments that were available 50 years ago, and listening to 50-year-old records on 50-year-old playback gear, the answer might seem more clear.

Actually, I was just kidding about the answer not being clear in the first place: Compared to the advancements achieved by their colleagues in other fields, audio engineers might as well have spent the past 50 years stripping the leaves off branches and dipping them into termite hills.

Certain new developments have been worthwhile. Hats off to everyone who makes low-friction tonearm bearings, transformers that resist saturation, and other marvels that eluded our elders. Modern capacitors work wonders in some applications, as do modern resistors. Silicon diodes, rectifiers, and regulators are useful. The KT120 is a nice tube. Modern plastics and adhesives have made possible some excellent panel-type loudspeakers. Through the miracle of science, we can now safely and effectively wash 80 years' worth of records.

But it seems the majority of engineers in today's audio industry put their greatest efforts behind the least worthy ideas. Complex cables and their integral "correction" systems. Systems that propagate soundwaves from behind and around the listener. Wireless this, remote that, gold-plated this, carbon-fiber that. Products in all categories that can scarcely be moved, let alone lifted, let alone afforded, simply because sheer bulk is the only way their inventors could imagine to make the things better. And, of course, ever-more-powerful amplifiers, as would be required to drive the industry's ever-less-drivable loudspeakers. God help us.

Remarkably, there remains, in the mainstream of perfectionist audio, a sticky film of reverence for Quad ESL speakers and Garrard 301 turntables that could nauseate at 20 paces—like hearing the members of Styx or Queensryche declare their love of Johnny Burnette and Gene Vincent. This seems especially true of the amplifier makers: "Marantz 8B? Greatest amp ever, and a profound influence on our work." Sure. That explains the Mercedes S-class prices, the ridiculously thick laser-cut faceplates, the complex, heavily regulated circuitry, and the output-power ratings that reach into the hundreds of watts and beyond.

That last one is especially hard for me to swallow.

The sounding board
For 18 years I've reported on that strange corner of the world where people insist on playing records through low-power amplifiers and high-efficiency loudspeakers—which, of course, is how the thing was done at the dawn of domestic audio. Ever the aspiring John Reed, I became a convert to the cause I covered: Thus I've not only spent a cat's age writing about scores of flea-watt amps and sensitive speakers, I've bought—and occasionally built—a goodly number of the things for myself.

Over time, I've become more unshakably convinced that this is the best approach for a record lover such as I, who values tone, touch, and musical flow over all else. (There are a lot of other all elses, from which you and every other listener are free to choose.) That conviction led to my purchase, last year, of a crazy, hulking pair of Altec 846A Valencia loudspeakers. Before their arrival, I had never enjoyed such a high and wild level of system responsiveness in my home.

This choice of words is not casual, but rather is inspired by my visit last year, while preparing an article for The Fretboard Journal, to the shop of renowned luthier Dana Bourgeois. He is among the handful of luthiers who spurred the return, to the steel-string guitar industry, of the voicing techniques once popular in factories before the 1940s and '50s: techniques that were abandoned in an effort to streamline production and to produce guitars that were more durable.

Bourgeois begins by considering the manner in which the instrument will be used—the player's touch and picking style, the gauge of strings that he or she prefers, the desired degree of loudness, and so forth—and selects for the top a pair of spruce boards of the precise degree of required stiffness. Bourgeois and his co-workers then brace the top; tap it at various different nodal points, listening for a particular tone; slightly thin the braces; then re-tap, re-listen, and re-thin until the desired tones are achieved. After the top is attached to the body but before its binding is attached, the luthier flexes the top and, if the desired flexibility is not observed, he or she gradually thins its periphery. Finally, after the top has been trimmed, a luthier trained in the procedure taps the bridge to ensure that the top is pushing back to just the right extent.

This method of matching the instrument—which is, of course, an acoustical source, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in one—to the player is so natural, so reliably right, that one wonders why it should be done any other way.

At roughly the time when the larger guitar companies abandoned the notion of voicing their instruments, the leaders of the domestic audio industry decided that, in their quest for flatter frequency response, greater frequency extension, and more "precise" stereo imaging, they would be better off designing their loudspeakers to be unresponsive—that is, to perform less efficiently at transforming electricity into movement, which is the single most important thing a loudspeaker does.

How then, you might wonder, would the consumer drive such an unresponsive loudspeaker? By buying a much more powerful amplifier, of course—because, thanks to Our Friend the Transistor, power is cheap. Besides, all competently designed amps sound the same. Right?

Parallel
Last October, on the day before the last leaves fell from the trees behind my house, a pair of Shindo Laboratory's newest mono amplifier, the D'Yquem ($24,995/pair), arrived at my house for a brief visit (footnote 1). The D'Yquem is named for Chateau d'Yquem, which produces the most expensive and universally well-regarded of sauternes. Novelist Thomas Harris had his star antagonist, Hannibal Lecter, buy a 1961 d'Yquem as a birthday present for protagonist Clarice Starling (it was never delivered), and Julia Child, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Jefferson were among the wine's most notable admirers.

Each D'Yquem amplifier produces up to 18W from a parallel pair of 300B directly heated triode tubes, operated in single-ended mode (and thus in pure class-A). Shindo Laboratory claims for the amp a signal/noise ratio of 110dB, an input impedance of 120k ohms, and harmonic distortion of 0.01%. Although an output-impedance specification is not offered, I assume that the D'Yquem's single secondary Lundahl output transformer is, in typical Shindo fashion, optimized for loads of 8 ohms and (especially) higher.

A glimpse inside reveals some interesting variations on the design and construction details I've seen in Shindo's other amplifiers during the eight years I've followed the brand. Like most amps in Shindo's current lineup, the D'Yquem doesn't use tube rectification, and while every semiconductor-rectified Shindo amp has an internally mounted EY88 diode tube between the AC transformer's high-voltage secondaries and ground—it slowly ramps up the rail voltage to help prolong the life of other parts—the D'Yquem has two EY88s, wired in parallel. Strange! Another unusual doubling-up is seen in the bias supply of this fixed-bias amplifier, where the two output triodes are served by no fewer than four potentiometers. The 300Bs are themselves a different sort for designer Ken Shindo: contemporary Russian-made tubes bearing the oft-traded Genelex label, instead of the Western Electric or Cetron tubes I've seen in all of Shindo's other 300B models.

As he has with all of his amps and preamps, Ken Shindo voiced the D'Yquem with a mixture of vintage parts from his reportedly vast stock of same—Sprague Vitamin Q and Black Beauty signal capacitors, a lovely old Mallory electrolytic cap for the bias supply, NOS Philips 6AW8A dual-triode/pentode tubes for input gain and buffering—and other parts that are decidedly modern. The latter include a smattering of French polypropylene-film capacitors from Solen, an uncharacteristically large (for Shindo) dry-electrolytic reservoir cap for the main power supply, a new type of Japanese ceramic-substrate resistor for select applications in the signal path, and the Swedish Lundahl transformers that Shindo has come to prefer for most of his products.

In contrast to the artisanal and altogether wooden Woody, the Abis SA-1 ($2350) is machined from aluminum alloy and assembled in a Tokyo factory that, I'm told, has 40 years of experience making tonearms under a different brand (which Sibatech declines to name). Indeed, my review sample seemed at least as well made as any other arm I've used, and although the SA-1 isn't produced with the sort of luxurious finish one sees on the Ikedas and Zetas of the world, its appearance and feel are solid, serious, and professional—not cobby.

Broad in the beam
According to Abis, the SA-1's effective mass, is "approximately 20 grams" and Sibatech and Mockingbird are up-front in saying that this very substantial tonearm is designed for use with low-compliance phono cartridges. Thus the SA-1, with its pivot-to-stylus distance of just under 9", is a unique alternative for those who want a tonearm of high mass but not of transcription length (12"), the latter phrase describing virtually all contemporary tonearms of greater-than-average effective mass.

The most obvious junk in the SA-1's trunk is its wide armtube of rectangular cross-section, a design distinction that gives it a passing resemblance to Dynavector's classic 507 models. Adding to that impression is the fact that the SA-1's offset angle, specified as 22°, is achieved not with a bend or a curve in the tube but with what appears, at first glance, to be a separate structural element, mounted at an angle to the main "beam." (A closer look reveals that this frontmost portion of the Abis arm is neither adjustable nor separate—the whole of it is apparently cast in one piece before being machine-finished—and so the hyper-adjustable Dynavectors remain unchallenged in that regard.)

The Abis SA-1's armtube is sufficiently wide—presumably to enhance stability during play, although its maker makes no such claim—that it remains a high-mass tonearm even with some of its junk drilled away, to make room for the signal wires and a distinctive downforce mechanism. The left- and right-channel wires occupy separate tunnels on the arm's underside, spaced as far apart as possible to maximize stereo separation; the downforce mechanism is a cylindrical weight that slides along a slender axial shaft, all within a hollow at the center of the armtube. Downforce is calibrated in increments of 0.5gm up to 3gm; a small, round auxiliary weight can be fitted into a hole of its own for another 1.5gm of pressure. The spring-actuated antiskating control, located near the arm pivot, is calibrated only to 3gm—a not-unreasonable limit, given the questionable value of bias force at higher downforces.

Installation was straightforward, eased by Abis's inclusion of a plastic arm-mount template that slips over the record spindle to precisely indicate where, on the armboard or plinth, one must drill the mounting hole (which is coincident with the exact center of the arm's horizontal pivot). That was ostensibly the most critical task—yet, as with all such tonearms and all such mounting collets, the screw holes required to hold the collet in place are equally important: To get them wrong is to squander whatever degree of accuracy was brought to bear on the primary mounting hole.

To solve this dilemma, I applied to the SA-1 an installation trick I've been using for the past few months. I began by choosing a drill bit that measures exactly the same as the arm collet's inside diameter—in this case, 20mm—then drilled the hole in precisely the spot indicated by the template. That done, I used cyanoacrylate to glue the collet to the surface of the armboard, having used an appropriately sized wooden dowel to precisely align the two openings and orient the collet's locking screw in the desired direction. After the adhesive dried, I used the holes for the collet screws to mark the precise points for the drilling that remained. (I have sometimes simply used a glued-down collet's screw holes as guides for my drill bit, with fine results.)

In setting up the SA-1, I encountered only one real obstacle: Its detachable headshell came equipped with signal leads that were too stiff and unyielding to allow any of my phono cartridges to be scooted all the way back to the rearmost position permitted by the headshell's adjustment slots. I compensated by substituting a set of (non–plastic-coated) leads that were much more forgiving—especially with the superb Miyajima BE II mono cartridge, whose staggered output pins help prevent this sort of problem from happening in the first place.

A final word about setup: Prior to setting downforce, I found that it was impossible to completely balance the SA-1's armtube under zero-downforce conditions. I don't know if that was due to the precise location of the arm's vertical bearings, the height of the counterweight relative to that of the fulcrum, or some other factor. The greatest practical consequence was that uncertainties in zero-downforce settings translate into uncertainties in positive-downforce settings, thus forcing the use of an accessory downforce scale during setup and disregarding the SA-1's built-in calibration for all but the coarsest settings. A secondary consequence, of concern only to reviewers and the insecure, is that the lack of ability to float an armtube makes it difficult to assess the quality of a tonearm's bearings. (The distributors of the SA-1 say that the quality of its ball-and-race lateral and vertical bearings is very high indeed.)

Tight, also
Notwithstanding the above, it wasn't long before I had the Abis SA-1 up and running on my lovingly maintained, early-'60s Thorens TD 124, with my Denon 103 cartridge installed and aligned in accordance with standard Baerwald geometry. (The Denon would be followed by my Miyabi 47 stereo cartridge and Miyajima BE II Mono cartridge.) After adjusting the cueing platform to compensate for the 124's unusually low-slung platter, the Abis arm was ergonomically good—and the plastic armrest clip that I at first cursed proved its worth in keeping the arm from flinging itself upward during cartridge changes.

With the first record I played—Country Cooking's 14 Bluegrass Instrumentals (Rounder 0006)—I was almost startled by the SA-1's tactile directness and musical rightness: It sounded remarkably good from the get-go. One expects a certain level of sonic immediacy from this album's twin-banjo assault, and the Abis arm did not disappoint. Yet it went further than any other 9" arm of my experience in applying the same tactile qualities to mandolin, violin, double bass, and even Russ Barenberg's beautifully phrased guitar lines, especially in "The Old, Old House" and "Big Ben."

The SA-1's ability to communicate tactile impact—or at least to not diminish it—was marvelous. The percussion in "Autumn," from Joanna Newsom's Have One on Me (Drag City DC390), leapt from the loudspeakers with as much apparent force as when I use my reference tonearm, the EMT 997 (which is mounted on a Garrard 301, with the attendant benefits of greater motor torque and a less lossy drive system). Ditto the notes Newsom plucked from her Lyon & Healy concert harp, which attained a similarly impressive level of force, combined with impressive timbral richness and color, each note blooming with realistic tension and substance. Here, as with other LPs, the SA-1 gave full, clean voice to the treble range, at times skating right up to the border between neutral and bright without ever tipping over—and its abundance of rich midrange color prevented the arm from sounding light, per se.

The Abis also managed, somehow, to turn my Altec Valencia speakers into imaging champs. With no loss whatsoever in the performance areas with which I'm most concerned—impact, timing, drama, flow, timbral color and substance—my Abis-fueled system compellingly informed me of the locations of most instruments in the London Symphony Orchestra in my favorite recording of Schubert's Symphony 9, led by Josef Krips (Decca/Speakers Corner SXL 2045). The Abis extracted equally good spatial performance from other recently enjoyed favorites, including the Grateful Dead's fine-sounding American Beauty (Warner Bros./Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab 1-014) and Bill Frisell's Good Dog, Happy Man (Nonesuch 79536-1).

But never mind all that. The Abis just plain damn played music, dammit. Melodies in that Schubert symphony were more compelling than I remember hearing through my hi-fi in a very long time, and with the SA-1 and the Miyabi 47 on my Thorens, I reconnected with American Beauty more musically and emotionally than sonically, reveling in the strange combination of adventurous, even audacious arrangements and performances of music that is, at its heart, as steeped in tradition as can be.

Footnote 2: Abis/Sibatech Inc., Room 1301, 8-25-22 Higashi-Suna. Koto-ku, Tokyo 136-0074. Japan. Tel: (81) 3-3645-1646. Fax: (81) 3-3645-1948. Web: www.sibatech.co.jp. US distributor: Mockingbird Distribution, LLC, Van Alstyne, TX. Tel: (214) 668-2509. Web: www.mockingbirddistribution.com.

"For us, unlike other manufacturers, there are not degrees of clean. Our entry-level machine is as good as our top of our line when it comes to cleaning records; in between, it's just a matter of choices." Thus spoke Jonathan Monks, who inherited from his father, the late Keith Monks, an audio-manufacturing legacy built upon the world's first commercially produced record-cleaning machine.

Our conversation was prompted by last year's introduction of the discOveryOne ($2495), the most affordable record-cleaning machine yet from Keith Monks Audio Works (footnote 1). The new model achieves this level of thrift in two ways: Rather than being fitted with the proprietary platter, motor drive, and vacuum arm of other KMAW machines, the discOveryOne is built around a modified Citronic PD-1 Mk.3 direct-drive turntable (footnote 2) and tonearm; and the new machine omits the automated fluid-dispensing and record-scrubbing systems used in KMAW's previous models. The former is an obviously less expensive way of doing things (though it may raise a few eyebrows among the faithful), while the latter is perfectly in keeping with the manner in which I use my own, far older Monks record cleaner, having long ago decided that I'm better than any machine at wetting and scrubbing records. (Sucking up solubilized dirt remains beyond my capabilities.)

I find it much easier to dispense the precisely correct amount of fluid onto a record's surface from a manual squeeze bottle, and manual scrubbing allows me to vary the pressure with which I scrub each LP, and to scrub especially dirty records using a rapid back-and-forth motion. Let's see any machine do that.

Indeed, I expressed those thoughts to Jonathan Monks back in 2009, when he gave me the opportunity to write about the newly revived company's first product, the Keith Monks Omni RCM Mk.VII ($6495). That model proved to be the best record-cleaning machine I'd tried, but it was priced far beyond my means—a sad thing to ponder, in the unfortunate event that my own RCM is ever recalled by the friend who loaned it to me.

Agitate, agitate, agitate
The borrowed RCM remains in place, yet a number of other things have changed since 2009. Keith Monks Audio Works has reasserted itself in the professional marketplace, which is the company's traditional strong suit. (Since 1969, KMAW has sold thousands of record-cleaning machines—to the BBC, the British Library, the U.S. Library of Congress, and myriad independent libraries, broadcast stations, universities, and record stores.) The domestic market for four-figure record-cleaning machines has seen a recent, healthy uptick, as one can observe in the success of the Audiodesk Systeme Glass Vinyl Cleaner ($3995; respectively reviewed by Michael Fremer and Fred Kaplan in the June 2012 and September 2013 issues) and its ultrasonic ilk. And, perhaps most important, the market for new and used vinyl has continued to grow, with no sign of slowing.

Thus the stage is set for the discOveryOne—which, like every other KMAW machine, owes its existence to the late Percy Wilson, technical editor (who died in 1977) of Gramophone magazine, whose writings became a roadmap of sorts for a record-cleaning machine industry that didn't yet exist. Wilson's design, intended only for professional use (footnote 3), was a titanically complex device called the Record Doctor, in which various appliances—a wetter, a scrubber, a "suction mop," and a spinning brush that acted as both a blow-dryer and a polisher—were applied to and retracted from a spinning disc, radially and in sequence. A radial heat lamp was added to confer the possible extra benefit of warp correction, and the recommended cleaning fluid was filtered rainwater, preferably heated to 120°F. (Earlier Wilson fluid recipes called for vinegar and, for really badass records, ethyl alcohol.)

Percy Wilson's contributions to our understanding of audio engineering in general and of phonography in particular were of considerable value, so it is with the greatest delicacy that I suggest that the Record Doctor, as originally conceived and prototyped, was a bit nutty. Fortunately, some engineers whom he brought in as collaborators—including John Wright, Mike Beville, Frank Ockenden, and Pete Keeley—pushed for a simpler and, ultimately, more effective design. The heat lamp and the spinning brush got the heave-ho, and the radial suction mop was replaced with a pivoting arm that was connected, by means of flexible tubing, to a medical-spec vacuum pump. A geared motor and a belt-drive pulley, hidden beneath the top plate, moved the arm at a speed of about 4" per minute across a record spun at 80rpm, both speeds having been determined by Wilson to offer the best hedge against premature evaporation.

The final touch: After Wilson and his collaborators noted that the vacuum arm wasn't removing all the cleaning fluid after a single pass, they hit on the idea of spooling a length of nylon sewing thread into the vacuum collection system, such that a tiny bit of thread is always squeezed between the record's surface and the nylon nozzle of the vacuum arm. Not only does the thread confer some welcome cushioning, it creates just enough of a gap between record and nozzle to enhance the vacuum effect. (Contrary to other reviews, this element does not exert a scrubbing or "wicking" effect, seeing as how a thread can no more fit into a record groove than a tree trunk can fit into a hotdog bun.) Yet another gear-driven motor was used to slowly but continually spool fresh thread into the system—the vacuum system took up the slack and disposed of spent thread with matching constancy—thus ensuring that the record was never recontaminated with its own filth: an important concern, in my opinion. This enhancement in particular made Wilson's contraption reliably effective, thus paving the way for its commercial production and sale by the aforementioned Keith Monks. The rest is history.

You'll have gathered that I regard the Keith Monks vacuum-drying system as the most crucial and, indeed, most impressive part of the system. Automated washing is a welcome and mildly entertaining luxury, but let's face it: As with appliances designed for the washing of dishes and clothing, most actual cleaning is done chemically. Soap and detergent molecules, which are polarized, have the dual characteristics of being able to attach themselves to certain contaminants, and of being able, through hydrogen bonding, to combine with water molecules, which are also polarized. Thus, apart from those small gestures that can enhance the soap-dirt bond—chief among them agitation—most of the work being done here is the removal of the water containing the solubilized contaminants. Or, to put it another way, most of the washing is accomplished in the rinsing and drying. So let's do it well.

I labor not
Fast-forward to today: How did my review sample of the discOveryOne stack up against Keith Monks models of yore? There were some obvious working differences, the most notable being that the discOveryOne's platter spins at a much slower 331/3rpm. I was mildly surprised that it wasn't set at 45rpm—of which the OEM turntable is also capable—and even more surprised that KMAW left in place the turntable's sliding-knob pitch control. As for the latter, Jonathan Monks takes a lighthearted view: "I think we're wearing the origins of that deck on our sleeve, and we'd have to pay someone to remove [the pitch control]. So we thought, well, why not leave it in—that, and the light that would normally illuminate the stylus of a deejay deck on the dance floor—for a bit of fun?" On the other hand, the microswitch that automatically sets the Citronic's platter spinning when the tonearm is moved from its rest has been put to excellent use: When the discOveryOne's vacuum arm returns to its resting position after drying the record, from inner groove to outer, the vacuum pump is automatically powered off.

Footnote 2: It appears to be a copy of a Technics SL-1200.

Footnote 3: Percy Wilson also invented the Record Player Cleaner, which was slightly more appropriate for domestic use if still far frompractical. Configured as a pivoting rather than a radial arm, the RPC was intended to damp-clean and then instantly dry a small portion of the groove at a time, a second or two before that portion reached the stylus.

It's like explaining religion in reverse: "These thousands of LPs—the ones that occupy the groaning shelves downstairs, and these boxes on which you stub your toes upstairs—are just like the virtual disc in heaven that, according to your easily led parents, contains all the albums you have ever bought. The difference is, you can touch these. Their existence, and your ownership of them, is demonstrable. You can hold them and look at them and move them from place to place. You can trade them if you want to, sell them if you have to. Yes, they can be stolen from you, but that requires real, physical work, and is thus unlikely to happen. Many are worth more than the sums for which they were purchased. And, as they age, they can be washed of most of their corruptions. They are real." It is a convincing speech, and I make it well.

It has not been without effect. For example, my daughter's best friend's brother asked for and received a turntable for Christmas, and his humble collection of LPs grows weekly (thanks in no small part to the fact that our village now has an excellent used-record store, called Xawax). This young man already has found a few titles that I covet, including a mint, original mono copy of Charles Mingus's The Clown, found for pennies on the dollar. Mingus, unlike youth itself, is not wasted on the young.

Primary caregivers
People who enjoy good mental health in abundance might not know it, but the addition of a thousand or so LPs to an already large collection brings with it a number of benefits. The most obvious, of course, is to expose the collector to new performances, compositions, and genres. One of my greatest windfalls so far has been the discovery and enjoyment of the singer and activist Paul Robeson, whose live recordings are satisfying on a number of levels. (If you're not familiar with Robeson, think Pete Seeger—whose music I also love, and whom I admired as an American—but with a little less sanctimony, a lot less banjo, and a magnificent trained voice.) And there remain several hundred unknowns I have yet to crack open. Life is good.

Other pleasures are more specific to the medium. One of those relates to my enduring opinion that analog discs surpass digital media—all digital media—at communicating the physicality, color, texture, presence, momentum, swing, and force of recorded music. I mean no condescension to those who haven't reached the same conclusion; at the same time, I don't see the point of trying to spare someone's feelings by keeping to myself an opinion about record players, for Heaven's sake.

Further, because much of my newly added collection was amassed in the 1950s and early '60s, many of the titles are in monophonic sound—and good mono sound offers a kind of listener engagement that multichannel recordings and playback simply can't match. Make no mistake, good stereo can sound convincing and beautiful in its own way—just think of all the great classical recordings on EMI and Decca, and of the big, dry, colorful stereo recordings Rudy Van Gelder made for Blue Note and others—but it also seems that every increase in sonic spaciousness brings with it a concomitant decrease in sonic touch and impact. Put another way: As you double the number of channels, it seems that the amount of real force that reaches the listening seat is halved.

So we are faced, yet again, with this axiom: The recording technology of a given age is sometimes best served by that era's playback technology. Consequently, if you lacked the luck to be born into a family that saved all their phono gear from the early 1960s—and I know very few people who are so blessed—you must now buy some of it back in order to unlock the magic in those mono grooves. You will need, at the very least, a true mono cartridge: one that produces an electric signal only in response to the mono groove's lateral modulations, thus leaving unread and unheard everything in the vertical plane (including most record damage: a secondary windfall). At the same time, there is no sense trying to maximize a medium known for its superior touch, texture, and impact if you haven't already upgraded your system to include a step-up transformer.

The latter, in fact, may be the most readily addressable challenge of all, if only because the selection seems to increase all the time. A case in point is the latest phono transformer from Bob's Devices, a North Carolina company I first wrote about in the June 2010 issue of Stereophile. Their new model is the CineMag Sky 30 ($1250), which is descended from—and nearly identical to—the CineMag 1131 ($1195), which I wrote about in the May 2012 issue. The primary difference is, literally, a primary difference: Whereas the 1131 offered switch-selectable impedance ratios of 1:40 and 1:20, for high- and low-gain settings, respectively, the Sky 30's choices are 1:30 and 1:15. According to Bob Sattin—the Bob of Bob's Devices—the lower-gain Sky 30 also exhibits lower inductance, which, all other things being equal, can equate to better sound.

As with the other step-up transformers available from Bob's, the hand-wired Sky 30 is constructed using a resistance-soldering station, which applies to the parts being joined far less wayward heat than a traditional soldering iron—no small consideration when working with fragile coils of very fine wire. A glimpse inside the Sky 30's cast-aluminum case confirms that its solder joins are indeed neat, shiny, and spare. Considered at a time when at least one other manufacturer seems to confuse solder with quick-setting cement, Bob's meticulously crafted Device is a welcome sight. Other outward signs of quality include gold-plated RCA jacks—XLRs are available on request—and a pair of silver-contact toggle switches from C&K. One of the latter selects between high- and low-gain primary coils, the other being used to lift the Sky 30's coils from the chassis ground.

Of course, each new record player and step-up transformer, or combination thereof, seems to require a slightly different grounding scheme from the last, and so it was when I added the Sky 30 to my system. I achieved the best, most humless results with the Sky 30 switched to Ground rather than Lift, and with a ground lead from my Garrard 301 turntable to the ground lug on the back of my Shindo Masseto preamplifier. (With the Bob's Devices transformer, it seemed at first that I could do without a ground lead and still enjoy perfect freedom from hum—until I switched off the Garrard's motor, at which point a mild hum persisted until I connected the above-mentioned lead. Go figure.) Incidentally, unlike with other transformers, the physical position of the Sky 30 relative to other components in my system had zero audible effect.

Although I didn't have the CineMag 1131 in-house and so could not run comparisons, it was my impression that the CineMag Sky 30's 1:15 setting was even more suited to my EMT mono pickups than either of the older model's settings. In recent months, especially after spending time with such exceptional mono records as the US version of the Rolling Stones' debut album, England's Newest Hit Makers (London LL 3375, in a late-'60s "boxed-logo" pressing) and the 1959 album Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster (Verve MG V-8343), I've come to realize that the best playback gear presents detail and impact as inseparable from one another. High-end phono cartridges, electronics, and loudspeakers that are renowned for their "airiness" often present detail without an iota of force; at the same time, we've all been tormented by high-power amplifiers and low-frequency speakers that present force in the manner of a howitzer, lacking even a suggestion of nuance—especially when used to play simplistic music at painfully high loudness levels, which tends to be the only way such products are demonstrated at shows and in shops. But when you start to notice that detail and force are two aspects of the same thing, you know you're in the presence of either real music or very good recordings and gear.