Analog Corner

Forty years ago, moving-coil cartridges were exotic. Now they're mainstream. The main advantage of MCs is obvious: rather than the system used in moving-magnet cartridges, in which relatively heavy magnets attached to the stylus's cantilever are moved past a stationary coil-and-armory assembly to create the electrical signal, moving coils, as the name implies, move the relatively lightweight coil and armature past the magnets. The lower the cantilever assembly's moving mass, the lower the system's response time. The lower the response time, the faster and more detailed the reproduction of the music. And MCs' electrical characteristics mean that they have greater bandwidth.

It's difficult to believe that more than five years have passed since Ortofon introduced its ground-breaking MC A90 moving-coil cartridge ($4200 when last available). The limited-edition MC A90, with its radically shaped body made of powdered stainless steel Selective Laser Melting (SLM), celebrated Ortofon's 90th year in business. The MC A95 ($6500), celebrating their 95th year, retains the A90's seductive shape, but the new body is built of powdered titanium, and thus is even more effectively self-damped.

But first, the blowback I expected following my February 2014 column on Synergistic Research's Uniform Energy Field Technology room treatments never arrived—in fact, quite the opposite. My own positive experience of the UEF devices was confirmed by e-mails from readers who'd already used them, and from those who'd taken up Synergistic's offer of a money-back guarantee. Skeptics will charge that what I and these readers heard is evidence of confirmation bias, but people say this about any positive remarks made about audio components priced above $500.

Add to the deniers of the Holocaust and Climate Change those who say that the vinyl resurgence isn't happening.

Seriously, the pushback was bound to happen, and the bigger this so-called "hipster fad" gets, the more the scoffers sweat. In 2014, according to my sources—representatives of the world's largest pressing plants—more than 73,985,000 LPs were pressed. That's correct: almost 74 million LPs. Taking into consideration such things as multi-LP boxed sets like The Beatles in Mono (which might be counted as a single record in terms of sales), defective discs rejected by consumers or retailers, and unsold records, of which there surely are many in the pipeline, we could cut the number in half—and still have around 35 million. That's more than a 40% increase worldwide over 2013.

How big is the performance gap between TechDAS's new Air Force Two ($52,000) and original Air Force One ($105,000) turntables? How do you halve the price without also sacrificing the build quality and features of the flagship model that defines the brand? Even $52,000 is more than most people pay for an automobile, not to mention a turntable. Still, TechDAS's assertion on their website that the price of their new model price is "reasonably improved" over the old strikes me as an understatement.

Does everything produce an improvement?"

My skeptical visitor, to whom I'd just pointed out some of the acoustic treatments and other accessories in my listening room, wasn't trying to push my buttons. He just wanted my opinion.

"No," I said. "Some things make the sound worse—way worse—but after all these years, I'm convinced that just about everything that can be done to a room or a system produces an audible difference, for better or worse."

In the April 2000 issue of Stereophile, I reviewed SME's Model 10, which was an attempt by that storied company to produce an "affordable" turntable. I described the Model 10's $5500 turntable-only price—about $7600 in today's dollars—as "stiff." (At the time, the Model 10 cost $5995 with SME's M10 arm, or $8250 with their IV.Vi arm.) But 16 years later, the same Model 10 costs only $5000 ($7000 with the more recent Model 10 arm, which is superior to the M10).