Turntable Reviews

...with a great engine and a nice set of tires you might be interested in...

Hmmmmm?

...know the answers to all of those questions, hundreds of thousands of audiophiles likely.

You don't?

I largely agree with a little of that, and prefer the convenience of networked digital storage, and don't like to handle recording media more than I have to, and don't want a large collection of media in my living space. Opinions vary. Others have different interests. If they do not share my opinions or your opinions, they are not wrong in their own subjective preferences. We all don't want the same thing. It is wrong-headed intolerance to expect all others to share all of your personal beliefs, and it would be a far less interesting world if they did.

I disagree with the notion that anyone necessarily puts their gear ahead of their music only because they might also enjoy some aspects of their hobby other than listening. If they do put the gear ahead of the music, then they are not wrong in that either.

You provide a good example on this. If you were not at least a little interested in the playback gear and associated schema, then you would not be here commenting on the gear. That doesn't necessarily imply that you put any of this ahead of your enjoyment of music, though it remains possible that you might. And either way, you would not be wrong in your preferences, rather would only be wrong if you imposed your preferences on others.

I own my house. I don't rent. I own my cars. I don't lease. I own many records which I purchased years ago which I could sell for more than I purchased them. If the you-know-what hit the fan, I have a tangible item which I own and could sell for a tidy chunk of change. I could stop buying records tomorrow, and still enjoy music for the rest of my life. So, yea, I could stream, and then not have any music of value, and which I may pay monthly to enjoy, otherwise, they pull the plug, and I'm sitting at home in silence. I could also have rented a house, and leased a car. Renting and leasing things is not how to build wealth. Streaming included. Oh, and yea, I much prefer the sound of vinyl.

In my opinion, turntables sound better than DACs, but you may not feel that way until you hear a very good turntable. I have a turntable and an expensive "big boy" DAC, server, etc. and EVERY person that has heard the two prefers the turntable.

But your nonsensical idea of streaming being better is simply wrong. A locally-stored source of digital music generally sounds better than streaming.

The whole truth? Some music is only available on LPs and other music is only available in the digital formats. If you want to hear a specific album that is not available on your streaming service you can buy a CD or a vinyl album and keep it for your lifetime. I have some albums that are 60 years old and ones that I bought last week.

As far as the fiddling goes, streaming is not always easy. Computer crashes, internet problems and such often occur, necessitating restarts and wasted time. Streaming services have lots of content, but not everything, by a long measure.

To enjoy comments from knuckleheads like Indydan. Glad to see Michael Trei writing good turntable reviews for Stereophile. Indydan you might check with your shrink to find out why this subject so upsets you. I have a really nice DAC/streamer i can compare to my turntable. You haven't a turntable to compare to your DAC and therein lies the difference between you and I.

All turntables are blah? All of them? You've heard them all I assume. Not.

Which turntables have you had extensive experience with? None?

The only person gaslit beyond further rational understanding is you. Your rigidity is proof of that.

...that in designing and producing this fine watch-grade turntable its makers have neglected the single most important criteria, which is absolute speed stability. I'm sure that having abandoned this crucial element that this particular fine watch-grade turntable is about as speed-accurate as a '79 VW. Vanagan. It only follows. I mean, all the rest of its kind are.

Apparently it also follows that the Publisher is in on it.

I'm equally convinced that the magnitude of listening ecstasy of wow-'n-flutter shoppers is hereby dented. Why, I never.

If you have enough experience to make such a comment, you would realize that numbers are important, but what you hear is more important. In my professional work, numbers are extremely important, but I have no idea what any of the specs are regarding my stereo. If I had significant wow and flutter, I would hear them without the need to measure. Wow and flutter are audible sounds. Your ears are the ultimate tool. Specs are interesting, but they are also very much a thing of the 1960s.

I sometimes marvel at the willingness of commenters to stake out a position and defend it at seeming all costs. At my house, we have a Bryston BCD-3 CD player and a recently-acquired Music Hall Stealth turntable both feeding a Luxman integrated amp. We massively enjoy the sound of both and appreciate the distinctive experiences. I'm quite content to live and let live, even in the realm of audiophilia.

"Simple arguments, absolutism and certainty." is the familiar style of reductionist gate-keepers, both ontologically and methodologically. When they fly a sortie toward normal people it's to harass them and generally behave uncivilly in service of an internal discomfort and coarse simplicity.

I trust that the listener high end realizes that audio woke has no interest in nuanced ideas, yours or theirs, or in higher goals. To them your individual experience must be Harrison Bergeroned by and to its subjective rules and imagined authority. Being unappreciative and intolerant, its purpose is thus to harangue, not because its found a better way, but because it denies there is one and lacks the decorum and integrity to conceive that.

That's not the scIeNc!1 they wave around either. It's a direct abuse of it.

LP playback does sound different than playback of commercial CDs, but the output of the LP playback system can be captured to a digital data file, which on playback will be analog and will sound the same as the direct LP playback which was captured into the digital domain. When properly done, you get back that which you put in.

You don't have to listen to the version mastered for commercial released CDs, but rather you can listen to your LP playback system using your own digital recordings of that LP playback, which can sound the same as direct LP playback, which is not the same as the sound from CD playback.

When properly executed with high quality modern equipment, good AD conversion followed by good DA conversion is going to be transparent to the listener. The output of the DA converter is always analog. The arguments for or against analog or digital too often miss the point. Most recordings are now tracked, mixed and mastered in the digital domain regardless the retail distribution medium, including new LPs. In usual modern practice, in tracking the recordings, the signal goes into the AD converter as far foward in the signal chain as is practicable. All mixing, processing and mastering happens in the DAW software, regardless if the retail distribution medium is a vinyl LP, optical digital media of some sort, or some streamed delivery service.

If your phono preamplifier is not integrated into your control preamplier, but rather is a separate external interconnected component, then you can capture the output of the phono preamplifier into an AD converter, transcode that to FLAC and save the datafile on your music server. Later decode the FLAC and recover the analog signal at the output of your DA converter, which if level matched and interconnected into the same control preamplifier, will playback effectively the same analog signal into that control preamplifier and downstream equipment. With good equipment and good process, any change in the resulting signal would be more than -20dB below the noise floor of the signal at the output phono preamp, and so would be truly trivial. The FLAC file would not only sound the same, but also would allow replay without handling the physical recording medium and turntable, and would also provide portability into the office, into the automobile, into a portable personal playback device, etc.

nt

After a quick search of the review, they are much like the VPI screw-down clamps, but different in the implementation as you state.

Nonetheless, I also wanted Michael to review both clamps for the sake of it. Good question.

I have heard this turntable for about an hour at a dealer event with a Hana ML at the front. I own the ML and love it, but alas, that would be the limiting factor in my brief audition of the unit. I was still mightily impressed. AMG takes their turntable and tonearm design very seriously. If I could inch up a bit in the market, this would be my first choice for an extended audition.