Brilliant Corners

"Give me the seduction, give me the pleasure," Ron Sutherland was nearly shouting into the phone. "I want to turn off the analytical mind and just enjoy myself!"

Sutherland speaks in the chipper Midwestern cadences of a comic character actor from the 1940s, sort of like a grown-up Eddie Bracken from The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and I'd never heard him sound so excited. He was talking about his new phono stage, the Dos Locos, the first product he's designed collaboratively, having enlisted a group of audiophile friends who listened to and critiqued each iteration. "These friends are excellent listeners," Sutherland related, "whereas I'm a gearhead, and don't have the patience or discernment for that kind of listening. Sometimes I'd change something and they'd say, 'You made it worse!'" It sounded like he preferred the group dynamic. "There was something very intimate about this back-and-forth process," he told me. "And compared to working alone, it was a lot more fun!"

To be honest, I've never thought of Sutherland as a pleasure-driven, throw-it-all-to-the-wind sensualist. His designs tend to be sleekly industrial and starkly minimal, with surgically neat internal layouts. And they rely on transistors, generally not the go-to devices for fill-up-the-hot-tub seductiveness (footnote 1).

I've had the opportunity to live with one of his previous phono stages, the Little Loco, which I admired more than loved. Like most transimpedance phono stages, it played music with enviably silent backgrounds and offered plenty of resolution, but it lacked the juke-box dynamics, rich colors, and sheer juiciness of my favorite tube or hybrid phono stages. Though I didn't dare tell Sutherland, the Little Loco spent much of its stay here on a shelf.

So why am I writing about the Dos Locos? For one, the Locos really are Dos—there are two monoblocks—with an unexpected double set of single-ended inputs and outputs on each chassis. This allows the user to plug in two cartridges and use either without having to switch between them—another quirky benefit of the transimpedance scheme. More interesting, at least to me, is that each monoblock can be used as a standalone mono phono stage, all without the need for a mono button, a splitter, or another method of avoiding ground loops that arise when using mono cartridges in stereo setups. In other words, the Dos Locos offers both a stereo and a mono phono stage in one. Well, in two.

The other reason I agreed to review it was Sutherland himself, who suggested the idea after reading a column I wrote about mono cartridges. When we spoke a little later, he sounded excited, not in the blandly upbeat manner of professional marketers but childishly, sincerely excited. That got my attention.

Writing about the Dos Locos in a recent column, Michael Trei did an excellent job of explaining how transimpedance phono stages work and pointing the reader to further resources, so I won't duplicate his work here. As for the Sutherland's features, there are none: what you get are two slim faceplates with LEDs indicating that units are on, and those RCA jacks and IEC inputs on the back. There are three-way gain switches under the lids, which are factory set to the middle value and which I left alone. Oh, and the Sutherland retails for $9800, or if you need only one Loco for a mono rig, $4900.

Transimpedance phono stages tend to work best with low-output moving coil cartridges that also have low internal impedances—Sutherland advises they be below 20 ohms—so I listened to the Dos Locos with the My Sonic Lab Diamond Reference (1.4 ohms) and the SPU Royal N (7 ohms)—reviews forthcoming—mounted on the Well Tempered Labs Amadeus 254 GT record player. For mono discs, I used a Miyajima Zero Mono (6 ohms) in the Schick 12" tonearm on my Garrard 301.

I connected the Dos Locos to either the silver EM/IA Remote Autoformer inductive volume control or the PrimaLuna EVO 400 tubed line stage, which in turn were connected to the Manley Labs Mahi amps driving Klipsch La Scala loudspeakers. Interconnects were from Auditorium 23 and speaker and power cables were from AudioQuest, the latter plugged into that company's Niagara 3000 power conditioner. While listening, I drank a lot of tea from Song Tea and Ceramics in San Francisco.

As regular readers know, I make no secret of being partial to tubes, which allow me to experience music with more of the visceral, emotional connection I crave than other amplification technologies. So I was not entirely prepared for the first notes that rolled out of the Dos Locos.

I began by listening to "Red Moon" from Big Thief's 2023 Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (4AD 4AD0408LP, Optimal pressing), a sprawling double rock album organized around Adrianne Lenker's unmistakable voice, which sounds as brain-puckering as a handful of SweeTarts. It's easily the most ambitious and successful of the band's releases, and one of my favorite post-pandemic records.

The Big Thief LP is hardly an audiophile recording. Many high-end systems tend to spotlight the imperfections of records like this one, rendering them listless and insubstantial. The Sutherland did nothing of the kind; it rendered Lenker's singing and Buck Meek's electric guitar with so much life force that I sat up on the couch and stared at the space between the speakers. What I heard was a huge dynamic envelope and unexpectedly vivid tone colors. And Max Oleartchik's bass came through with the kind of extension and hard-edged definition that tube phono stages rarely muster. The soundfield was vast and existed within a shockingly silent silence.

More importantly, the Dos Locos locked onto the performances, drawing my attention record after record to the musically important details. On "Hallelujah Time" from the first US pressing of The Wailers' Burnin' (Island SMAS-9338), Aston "Family Man" Barrett's bass notes sounded appropriately scary-big but also bounced and danced with the requisite tunefulness. Peter Tosh's raking guitar strokes and Bunny Wailer's soaring vocal completed a rendition that was propulsive, rocking, and easy to listen to. The dryness, sterility, and leaden pacing I associate with some solid state gear was nowhere to be heard.

Of course I couldn't wait to experience the phono stage in its Uno Loco configuration with my favorite monophonic platters. To get the obvious out of the way, when I turned up the volume I heard no ground hum—a reason for celebration. In fact, with the preamp turned up to normal listening volume, I heard no noise of any kind coming out of the ultrasensitive La Scalas.

The first record I played was Devil May Care (Bethlehem BCP-11) by the wonderful Bob Dorough. For those unfamiliar with this utterly original artist, he made a series of sporadic but mostly terrific jazz recordings of standards and originals. His light, high tenor voice and singular, almost sprechstimme phrasing is slightly reminiscent of Blossom Dearie, Dorough's lifelong friend and occasional recording partner. In 1962, Dorough recorded a vocal with Miles Davis that five years later appeared on the Miles Davis Quintet's Sorcerer, a move that attests to both musicians' undeniable hipness.

Somewhat strangely, Dorough became best known for his directing, writing, and singing for the ABC educational show Schoolhouse Rock! So if you spent your childhood (or adulthood) singing along to "Three Is a Magic Number" or "Conjunction Junction," you already know something about Bob Dorough's music.

Devil May Care, from 1956, is my favorite of the Arkansas native's jazz recordings. I've been looking for a first pressing for nearly a decade, so when Ken Micallef showed up with a clean copy signed by Dorough, announcing that he'd just picked it up at my neighborhood record store for a measly $30, I felt a cold stab of acquisitiveness and envy. After I calmed myself down, Ken and I listened to it through the Sutherland.

On the most charming version of "Polka Dots and Moonbeams" I'm aware of, Dorough's voice materialized out of the air with breathtaking presence, sonority, and fidelity. It was startling to hear a nearly 70-year-old mono LP capture such a complete sense of ambient space and reverberation. Dorough's voice, still callow with youth and free of the caramel-and-whiskey timbre it had taken on during the Schoolhouse Rock! years, came through the speakers scaled to larger-than-life-sized dimensions. The whole thing sounded mesmerizing. Just then I may have begged Ken to sell me the record for way more cash than he paid for it, but being no fool he laughed my request away.

We also sampled "Lover Man" from Carmen McRae's Sings Lover Man and Other Billie Holiday Classics (Columbia CL 1730). Ken and I share an admiration for McRae, a singer's singer whose dramatic and interpretive abilities can make Ella Fitzgerald sound overly literal and Sarah Vaughan like a girlish showoff. Through the Uno Loco, "Lover Man" came through sounding as sensuous, restless, and tartly sorrowful as I've heard it, showing off the magic of both McRae's artistry and properly reproduced mono playback.

Listening, I marveled at how much more vivid, dynamic, and downright liquid the Dos Locos sounded compared to the Little Loco I'd lived with. The newer phono stage sounded not like an improvement on its predecessor but like a completely different paradigm, with particular attention paid to musical acuity, ease of engagement, and sheer pleasure. In purely sonic terms, too, it was hands-down better in every single parameter.

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Footnote 1: Sutherland Engineering, 455 East 79th Terr., Kansas City, MO 64131. Tel: (816) 718-7898. Email: info@sutherlandengineering.com. Web: sutherlandengineering.com.