Brilliant Corners

As you might expect, setting up a cartridge on the Amadeus 254 GT is simplicity itself. That's not entirely the case with the rest of the 'table. Hanging the tonearm from its gantry proved relatively easy, but only after I watched a YouTube video showing how it's done. While substantive, the user manual is also fairly confusing and sometimes seems to refer to other turntable models. Threading the thinner-than-floss belt around the motor spindle and the platter also took some trial and error. And pouring the silicone goo into the tonearm cup proved so maddeningly slow that I sawed the little plastic bottle's nozzle off with a box cutter. This decision required learning how to clean up silicone spills on upholstered furniture. It turns out I could have just unscrewed the nozzle. Embarrassing. Unspeakable. Sad.

According to Pranka, the one truly critical adjustment on Well Tempered 'tables is how far to lower the tonearm's base into the silicone bath—in other words, determining the ideal amount of damping, which varies slightly with every cartridge. Not enough damping, and the 'table will sound flimsy and insubstantial; too much and it will sound tubby and slow. In practice, I found this adjustment fairly intuitive, though of course it also affects the arm's vertical tracking angle, which has to be finalized with a grub screw after the damping level is set.

The Amadeus 254 GT offers a radically different feel than my Garrard/Schick record player. With its massive motor, all-metal construction, and idler-driven platter, the Garrard looks and feels the way it sounds: purposeful, explicit, and substantial, with a powerful sense of drive. In comparison, with its barely visible polyester threads and cups of viscous goo, the Amadeus appears fidgety and eccentric. The belt is knotted by hand, and when the knot passes over the spindle, it makes a "clunk" that's audible from up close. When I sweep the AudioQuest antistatic brush over a record, the Amadeus's platter tips away from the center under its weight. And the tonearm moves like a sleepwalker, slowed by all that silicone fluid. Looking at it in action made me wonder: if this 'table sounds the way it looks, could it possibly be any good at playing records?

Listening
After installing the Ortofon Cadenza Bronze cartridge, but before finalizing the Amadeus's damping level and VTA, I dropped the needle on "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads" from a first pressing of Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (Reprise FS-1021). Sure enough, the sound was a bit slow and thick, indicating that the arm was overly damped. But I heard something else that's more difficult to describe: Even with the sound not fully optimized, the music sounded irresistible, poised on an edge between Sinatra's late-'60s Vegas bombast and the surprising vulnerability and earnestness he brought to his encounter with the young Brazilian phenom. I found this experience unsettling because I could not link it to any sonic criteria. It was as though what I was experiencing happened entirely in the realm of musical interpretation.

Subsequent listening, after the damping had been optimized, only deepened this impression. Recordings played back through the Well Tempered 'table sounded more alive than I'd experienced them before, drawing my attention to the performances and making me notice musical nuances as opposed to sonic ones. Sitting down to listen critically, I found myself following musical tangents instead, playing all four clangorous sides of Can's 1971 Krautrock landmark Tago Mago (Spoon XSPOON6/7) or digging out a copy of Pat Martino's Baiyina (The Clear Evidence) (Prestige PR 7589), a lovely slab of late-'60s Indo-jazz fusion that bills itself as "a psychedelic excursion through the magical mysteries of the Koran." Often, these listening sessions lasted until it suddenly dawned on me that my neighbors were probably asleep and that I needed to be as well.

I want to make it clear that the Amadeus's extraordinary musical vividness, and my corresponding emotional engagement, weren't fleeting sensations that came and went depending on my mood. While this vividness may not be easy to describe, it was obvious with every record I played. Moreover, changing cartridges didn't seem to affect it. When I replaced the Ortofon with a Dynavector DRT XV-1s, I clearly heard the exquisite delicacy, transparency, and dynamic freedom this cartridge brought to the sound, but the switch didn't significantly affect my degree of engagement.

To paraphrase Firebaugh, what was going on here anyway? Surely there were some sonic clues to how, and why, the Amadeus played records in such an addictively exciting way. I may have stumbled across one during the first 10 seconds of "I'm an Old Cowhand" from Sonny Rollins's Way Out West (Contemporary S7530). Listening to Shelly Manne's clippety-clop drumming, which I've heard countless times, I realized that he is playing considerably faster and freer than I'd remembered, so by the time Rollins's lumbering tenor saxophone comes in, the musical tension is sky high.

After replaying and marveling at this passage, I began to make rhythmic discoveries on other recordings. Listening to the Garrard and the Well Tempered side by side, I realized that while my antique British deck played with more forward propulsion, or drive, the Amadeus played with more temporal precision, nimbleness, and nuance. In comparison, the Garrard sounded like it was playing a slight approximation of the actual rhythm. In listening terms, this distinction lent the Well Tempered a greater sense of drama.

Another difference lay in the Amadeus's unusually coherent take on the music.

Rather than presenting a recording as a combination of various frequency ranges—say, a mellow treble and powerful bass flanking a recessed midrange—it portrayed it as a single sonic event. This approach made recordings sound relaxed and natural, and glued my attention to what the musicians—rather than the engineer—were doing. I confess that I really, really enjoyed this effect.

By now you must be impatient to know what the Amadeus sounded like. I promise I'm not being coy or pretentiously poetic in confessing that I found picking apart this turntable's sound quite difficult, because it consistently directed my attention elsewhere. I can tell you that the Well Tempered sounds dynamically unrestrained and slightly warmer than neutral without any loss of resolution or speed. While it doesn't play with as much physicality and grunt as the Garrard, it captures just as much texture and color and reproduces bass with just as much heft. And it lets go of notes with an ease I haven't experienced before, which feels like an absence of a certain kind of distortion.

But a list of sonic attributes—a big part of what we usually do in the equipment review section of this magazine—doesn't adequately capture what makes this turntable different. To get at that, you have to consider what makes listening satisfying for you, and then try to hear one.

Mike Pranka's balls
In our conversations about the Amadeus 254 GT, Mike Pranka told me that emotional engagement is precisely what Bill Firebaugh was after in his designs. Yet after having set up hundreds of Well Tempered record players, Pranka decided that their musicality can be further improved with a few tweaks. He advised me to leave the finger lift off the tonearm and suggested I try the birch balls he sent along with the review sample in place of the squash balls in the Amadeus's suspension.

Getting at the suspension is as easy as lifting the top half of the plinth, so the swap took less than a minute. With the birch balls in place, I heard an even greater sense of rhythmic elan and precision and even more coherence, but at the expense of the sound: the soundstage shrank and flattened, and tonal colors turned grayer. Ultimately I felt that the tradeoff wasn't worth it and reported my findings to Pranka, who said that they mirrored his own.

When he came for a visit in March, Pranka brought along a new set of balls: He'd split the birch balls and glued them back together with a layer of cork in the middle. The cork, which is the same material used in the record mat, is intended to provide a touch of damping. After installing them, we spent several hours listening to George Jones, Melba Montgomery, the Louvin Brothers, and other classic country LPs. Happily, with the new tweak, records sounded more consistently exciting and engaging but this time with no sonic penalties. Pranka says that he will make a set of the new balls available to customers curious about doing some tweaking. I'm leaving mine in.

Where does this leave us? I've been an audiophile for enough years to know that while there's plenty of great-sounding and -looking gear out there, it's no use to me unless it can make me feel something every time I sit down to listen. And Bill Firebaugh's strange and highly original record player is the most musically insightful and emotionally rewarding one I've lived with—more so by a clear margin than even my beloved, beautiful Garrard 301. Living with the Amadeus has been a revelation about the prime importance of musicality, a quality we tend to ignore in favor of sound effects, often to our long-term detriment.

I cannot think of a more recommendable component.