LATEST ADDITIONS

For one thing, because they tend to be healthy and well educated, and because their governments are at peace and, for the most part, economically and politically sound, Scandinavians can take a joke. For another, Scandinavians are famous for not only having a loudspeaker industry—something that has thus far eluded Spaniards, Corsicans, Ethiopians, and the Maltese, among others—but also for the distinctiveness of the speakers they make. Like the Scandinavian people themselves, their speakers are intelligent, serene, uncompromising, outwardly serious and inwardly whimsical, outwardly tidy and inwardly complex, and a bit quirky.

But when the phono cartridge of choice is a moving-coil (MC) type, which generates even less voltage than its moving-magnet (MM) and moving-iron (MI) friends, even more gain is required. This presents the user with an additional choice: he or she can select from among the many standalone phono preamps that offer sufficient gain, or augment an existing phono or full-function preamp or integrated amplifier with a phono step-up transformer, which boosts gain passively, without using tubes or transistors.

In my previous episode, I threw down the gauntlet: Can the world’s best headphones hold up to the world’s best loudspeakers in a perfectly-treated room? Of course we know that headphones image completely differently from loudspeakers. The transient impact of transducers lodged on your ears is distinctly different from loudspeakers at 9 foot distance. The loudness ratios of forward and distant elements, direct and reverberant sound are also different between phones and speakers. But we certainly can compare the tonal accuracy of the two presentations.