Every month Stereophile magazine offers authoritative reviews, informed recommendations, helpful advice, and controversial opinions, all stemming from the revolutionary idea that audio components should be judged on how they reproduce music.
Dispelling a myth(?) about phono-cartridge loading In the midst of his December Gramophone Dreams column, Herb Reichert presented the results of an experiment. He was listening to the most recent version of Zu Audio’s Denon DL-103, installed on his new-old Lenco. He hooked it up to the moving coil input of his SunValley SV-EQ1616D’s phono preamp, which apparently is intended for use with low-output MC cartridges since it loads them down with a 50 ohm shunt resistor—a heavy load for all but the lowest-impedance MCs. The rough rule of thumb for loading an MC cartridge, as many readers are aware, is that the load resistance should exceed the cartridge’s internal impedance by about a factor of 10. As MC cartridges go, the DL-103 has a high source impedance, around 40…
Tink Walks Amok The Frank Zappa album The Man from Utopia includes the track “Tink Walks Amok,” which is an athletic study in syncopation and polyrhythms. It’s a cool track. I’ve owned the LP since its initial release in 1983 and heard it first on my elder brothers’ pretty good stereos and since then on my own, much better systems. I spin it now on a VPI Prime/Ortofon rig via a tubed phono stage. I noticed the album up on Qobuz, so I took the easy way out and streamed it instead of finding and cleaning my LP. Soon I noticed something different: What on LP had always been (and still was on the Prime) a bit of slightly murky-phasey cymbal work centered in the soundstage was now a wide-open…
RECALIBRATION: MAGNETIC REFERENCE LAB ANNOUNCES IMPENDING SHUTDOWN Tom Fine Everyone who buys anything made from magnetic tapes, be it all-analog LPs, reissues of recordings made prior to relatively recent history, or digital transfers from analog tapes, should worry when the main maker of playback-calibration standards for all tape machines closes its doors. Without standardized calibration tapes, which were used to align the machines on which master tapes were recorded, it isn’t possible to get accurate playback, whether it’s to a lacquer disc or a digital file. What’s more, technicians who restore and repair tape machines use calibration tapes in the machine’s final setup to adjust playbackhead azimuth and fine-tune it to correctly track the desired equalization curve.1 At the beginning of October, this text appeared at the website of Magnetic…
The MasterPhono from Mobile Fidelity Electronics During my cub reporter days at Stereophile, I was always on the lookout, casting about for midlevel analog components I might latch on to, ones that could join my long-term daily-driver reference system by complementing the character of my midlevel DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93 and Falcon LS3/5a loudspeakers. I was searching for these basic traits: alive and vigorous, clear and well-sorted, relaxed and natural. One of my first-ever Stereophile reviews, in the October 2014 issue, was of Sentec’s EQ11 phono preamplifier, which featured six EQ choices, selectable from the front panel, Bakelite knobs, Switchcraft switches, and a gray Hammerite-paint finish. When I reviewed the Sentec, I owned three turntables and about 300 records. But phono stage–wise, I was a beggar and a borrower, hoping…
Realizing the analog you “The phonograph record is an art form itself,” Lester Koenig wrote in March 1959, “and one of its advantages is the performance that exists uniquely of, by and for the record.” Remarkably, when Koenig included this pronouncement in his liner notes to Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders, the 12" long-play record had been the dominant carrier of recorded music for less than a decade, and stereo discs had been mass produced for just over a year. For Koenig, this issue wasn’t merely academic. Before making his name as head of Contemporary Records in Los Angeles, he had attended Yale Law School, worked as a screenwriter and producer at Paramount, and gotten blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At Contemporary, he set out to…
The Wand 14-4 turntable, and a visit to SME In prior screeds, I have discussed the category of turntable designers I like to call deep thinkers, who twist their brains to come up with fresh thinking about how to approach the task of playing a vinyl record. If there is a poster boy for deep thinkers, it’s got to be Simon Brown. Brown is based on the South Island of New Zealand. I’m thinking that being in such a far-flung part of the world must have given his head plenty of space to get creative. First, in 2011 he created The Wand tonearm, a striking unipivot design that features a fat carbon-fiber armtube nearly 1" in diameter. Art Dudley wrote about The Wand in 2019,1 and I highly recommend that…
