Analog Corner

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 (footnote 1). 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.

Pro-Ject alone claims to have sold some 110,000 turntables in 2014, and their least expensive model, the Elemental, wasn't the biggest seller. The Pro-Ject factory, in the Czech Republic, runs three shifts 24/7 and employs some 400 people. I understand from Rega Research, VPI Industries, and other turntable makers that 2014 was their best year ever.

Nonetheless, there's denial. I was first confronted by it during an otherwise collegial "Meet the Editors" panel at T.H.E. Show Newport Beach 2015. That was when Chris Connaker, editor of Computer Audiophile [since renamed Audiophile Style] grouchily dismissed as ridiculous my claim that vinyl is "huge," because more people streamed Taylor Swift's 1989 (a great album, actually) than the total vinyl sales for the 2014. Trouble is, I never claimed that vinyl is "huge," on that panel or anywhere else. When I mentioned that to Connaker, he sarcastically suggested that rewinding "the tape" would prove otherwise. So I obtained and posted on AnalogPlanet.com the video recording of the panel, in which Connaker also says that vinyl is "a fad," and that, when he plays a record, it "sounds terrible."

The point I did make during the panel discussion: Why compare vinyl's resurgence with streaming or with downloads, or even with other physical media? While we're at it, why not dismiss gourmet dining, which barely exists compared to fast-food franchises? Why not dismiss Ferrari by comparing its minuscule sales numbers with Toyota's?

Of course, the best response is: Why compare those companies and their products at all? Why compare vinyl to all-you-can-eat audio streaming, which, other than Tidal's CD-resolution service, has the same effect on my ears that all-you-can-eat buffet grazing has on my stomach?

This brings me to the most surprising vinyl denier of all: audio journalist Ken Kessler, a longtime friend. Kessler expressed his vinyl cynicism in the December 2012 issue of the UK magazine Hi-Fi News: "Unlike many of my dewy-eyed colleagues, I don't buy into the alleged 'LP revival.' My cynicism is based on numbers." He went on to report that, in 2011, according to Nielsen SoundScan—which I can assure you is notoriously unreliable—337,000 LPs were sold in the UK, which Kessler correctly describes as an "upward blip."

However, in 2014, UK LP sales reportedly reached 1.3 million. That didn't stop my friend from belittling the trend in a more recent piece, for the online magazine SoundStage! Hi-Fi, in which he dismisses the increase by comparing that number to a month's worth of sales of Beatles albums in 1965. Beatles? 1965? Kessler continued, "So please don't tell me the LP is back. It isn't. It's a niche, however much we love it."

I agree: It's a niche—just as the entire high-performance audio industry has always been. So what? The vinyl revival is a niche, and the LP is incontrovertibly back.

Before referencing yours truly and signing off, Kessler rightly dismissed a statement by UK audio retailer John Lewis, reported in the Daily Mail, claiming a 240% increase in UK turntable sales in 2014. After reading the fine print, Kessler learned that a good percentage of those 'tables were groove-chewing "kiddie" and Crosley (footnote 2) models. Ken Kessler concluded his column with:

"I tell you this lest my dear friend Mikey Fremer or some other champion of analogue suddenly gets a massive hard-on because of news from the UK 'that turntable sales are up 240 per cent.' For those with a glass half full, the sales of any record player are good news.'

"For those of us with leaky vessels, we await the Second Coming."

I'm happy to be cited in any context as having a massive hard-on, but groove-chewing 'tables have never been on my radar. They're not welcome, nor are they needed to make the case for the vinyl resurgence—in fact, they're a toxin on the market. The glass is well more than half-full without them. In fact, by any metric, our analog cups runneth over.

Return of the Measurement Scolds
Yes, measurements count. Listening counts more. After all, you don't listen to measurements, and being guided by them to the exclusion of what your ears tell you seldom turns out well. For 40+ years, listeners held the high-end audio line—but now, thanks to the Internet's electronic soapbox, the measurement scolds have returned in force.

Online click-bait stories "prove" that CDs are without flaw, and that high-bit-rate MP3s are sonically indistinguishable from that supposedly "perfect" format. An ongoing effort, described by some as "the Emperor's new clothes" or "a waste of digital real estate," hopes to thwart high-resolution digital audio—even as digital storage capacity has become dirt cheap and wide bandwidth plentiful. Some online stories claim that higher resolution produces worse sound. In what other field is so much effort expended in putting a stopper on better?

Recently, audio writer Brent Butterworth, whom I greatly respect, wrote on AudiophileReview: "Many audio enthusiasts describe the effects of MP3 much as they would describe the effects of dubbing audio onto analog tape, which has a deleterious effect on almost every aspect of audio quality (frequency response, dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio, distortion, etc.)."

Really? So MP3s make CDs sound like analog tape? I wish!

Yet somehow, analog tape produced 40+ years of the greatest recordings ever made. If digital recording is so good and analog tape has such a "deleterious effect on...audio quality," where are today's Kenneth Wilkinsons, Bob Simpsons, Fred Plauts, and Lewis Laytons? I'm waiting. What digital recording can be compared to Harry Belafonte's At Carnegie Hall? Recorded in 1958, it continues to astonish listeners almost 60 years later.

Fuuga moving-coil cartridge: Miyabi Reborn?
Even if this cartridge weren't any good, its backstory would be worth telling. But don't worry: It's plenty good—and, at $8950, plenty pricey.

In the 1970s, Haruo Takeda was the man behind the cartridges sold under the Cello, Krell, and Mark Levinson brand names. It was only toward the end of that decade that Takeda began work on his own cartridge: the original Miyabi—which, roughly translated from the Japanese, means "elegance."

Made only in limited numbers, the Miyabi quickly became a legend. Later, Takeda partnered with 47 Laboratory's Junji Kimura to produce the Miyabi 47 cartridge, which shed the original Miyabi's semi-cylindrical body but retained its alnico magnets.

I wrote about the Miyabi 47 some years ago (in Analog Corner No.138), and while I appreciated its intoxicating liquidity, and especially its unique ability to track dynamic gradations and produce "speed" without etch, its top end was too laid-back for my system and taste.

Haruo Takeda retired a few years ago, but Osamu Nagao, the Japanese distributor of Miyabi cartridges and a good friend of Takeda's, decided to revive the brand—and, more important, the cartridge's singular sound. Nagao brought to the project 30 years of analog experience, including working at the Japanese companies Stax Limited, Audiocraft, and R.F. Enterprises, the importing/distribution company credited by many with introducing high-performance audio to Japan. Nagao was also part of the design team that created the Infinity Black Widow tonearm.

Nagao hired Tetsuya Sukehiro, a young cartridge designer with more than a decade's experience making OEM products for some well-known (but unnamed) brands. Three years later, in summer 2014, they introduced the Fuuga, a cartridge whose name means "elegance with flair." They nixed their original plan to reverse-engineer the Miyabi in order to use newer and better materials, and because Takeda's unique cantilever suspension made unit-to-unit consistency of performance difficult, if not impossible, to attain. But Nagao never forgot the Miyabi's sound, and still wanted to re-create it.

The original Miyabi's alnico magnet system was scrapped in favor of extremely powerful magnets of neodymium (this change alone will probably induce heart failure in Miyabi groupies), and the rigidity of the rear yoke structure was greatly increased by making it of solid iron (instead of an alloy of cobalt and iron), and incorporating it into the cartridge's body, which was also updated—from solid aluminum to three layers of different-density duralumin alloy.

Footnote 2: Crosley is an old name in consumer goods that, after changing hands in the '70s, is now applied to a line of very inexpensive electronics, including a $99.95 all-in-one portable record player.