Analog Corner

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Analog CornerPhono Cartridge ReviewsTonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Analog Corner #295: Rega Planar 10 turntable, RB3000 tonearm, Apheta 3 phono cartridge
Michael Fremer  |  Feb 18, 2020  |  First Published: Mar 01, 2020  | 
Lately it seems that the more Rega charges for one of its turntables, the less you get—and from Rega's performance perspective that's a good thing.

While some turntable designs pile on the mass, hoping to tame resonances and better isolate the record from the outside world, Rega has long advocated ultralow-mass designs. What's up with that?

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Analog CornerAudacious AudioPowerline Accessory Reviews
Analog #246: AudioQuest Niagara 7000 Low-Z Power Noise-Dissipation System
Michael Fremer  |  Feb 09, 2016  | 
Are you old enough to remember when the wires connecting speakers to even the most expensive and sophisticated electronics were 16-gauge, multistrand lamp cord, and the terminals on speakers and amplifiers were just little screws? Sometimes those screws wouldn't even secure all of the wires' strands, but as long as loose strands from one screw didn't touch loose strands from the other, it was good enough . . . and back against the wall went your bookshelf speakers.
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Analog CornerTonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Analog Corner #233: Pear Audio Blue Kid Thomas turntable & Cornet 2 tonearm
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 09, 2015  |  First Published: Jan 01, 2015  | 
Pear Audio Analogue's Peter Mezek can keep you up all night spinning fascinating turntable tales. Had my mind not been numbed by Sunday evening, October 12, the last day of the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I might have insisted that he do just that.

Over dinner that evening he regaled Pear Audio's North American importer, Michael Vamos of Audio Skies, and me with turntable stories dating back to the late 1970s and the Linn Sondek LP12, which, until the early '80s, he distributed in Czechoslovakia. In the mid-'80s, Mezek was involved in the development and distribution of the Rational Audio turntable, designed for Mezek by Jirí Janda (pronounced Yeerzhee Yahnda), who died in 2000. For those of you old enough to remember, Janda, a founder of NAD, designed that company's 5120 turntable; among other features, it had a flat, flexible, plug-in tonearm that you could easily swap out, much as you can with VPI's current models.

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Analog CornerAudacious AudioTonearm Reviews
Analog Corner #239: Swedish Analog Technologies tonearm
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 09, 2015  | 
Late in the fall of 1982, Los Angeles turned ugly for me. I'd finished my work on Tron and despite the Academy Award nomination for Best Sound (which went to the mixing team, not the sound supervisor), it was obvious that nothing else was coming my way anytime soon. To earn a living, I had to reinvent myself.

So there I was in Las Vegas, at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, schlepping heavy bags filled with press kits, each containing an audio cassette of a dozen radio commercials for a car-stereo store that I'd voiced and produced, along with a résumé-bio and endorsements from clients.

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Analog CornerPhono Cartridge Reviews
Analog Corner #236: Clearaudio Maestro V2 phono cartridge
Michael Fremer  |  May 21, 2015  |  First Published: Apr 21, 2015  | 
Clearaudio began making moving-coil cartridges in the 1970s, and only later got into the moving-magnet business. Moving-magnet cartridge designers must now be mindful that most of today's tonearms are of medium to high mass and that therefore, to be compatible, their MMs must be of low to medium compliance and of higher mass than those of the 1960s and '70s.
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