Gramophone Dreams

What I know is, listening to recorded music while trapped in my always-judging, buzz-killing left brain is discomfiting. Listening analytically feels like work because it limits my access to the fun parts of music, which is what really matters about music: feeling and attitude.

When I want to go deep into artists like Béla Bartók, Eno, or Ornette Coleman, I am lost without strong guidance from my right brain. Understanding difficult art requires large amounts of what my left brain derisively calls magical thinking. So does kissing and listening to Led Zeppelin. When my always-amazed right brain is out and working, Vladimir Horowitz is a fire-breathing monster, Yuja Wang is a princess-warrior, and John Cage is a smirking wizard. I am always Alice in Wonderland. And that's how I like it.

Are we ready to campaign for more right-brain participation in our listening experiences? I am. Whether we're listening to "Tutti Frutti" or Così fan tutte (footnote 4), every artist's spiritual, ethical, and poetic intentions must be transmitted. I believe that for that to happen, and for our audiophile hobby to move forward in a positive, pleasurable, audience-expanding manner, our left brains need to establish a more cooperative relationship with our right brains. The future of our hobby may depend on it.

Hagerman Audio Labs Piccolo Zero
My goal each month is to find something new for readers to think about and possibly care about. That includes not only ideas about turntable-drive strategies but also discovering products with extraordinary potential like Hagerman Audio Labs' new $249 Piccolo Zero transimpedance head amp (footnote 5).

In late 2016, Jana Dagdagan, Stereophile's former editorial coordinator, interviewed Jim Hagerman. Hagerman Audio Labs is in Hawaii, which is Jana's birth state, so Jim began the interview saying "Aloha Jana. Hagerman Audio Labs is a small company focused on the design and manufacture of audiophile-grade electronics. We offer unique products that provide true value through innovation, elegance, and simplicity. All products are handcrafted in the USA, come with a 5-year warranty, 30-day trial period, and free shipping to USA." That's all still true.

I "met" Jim Hagerman over email while reviewing the Tuba, his $649 headphone amplifier, for Gramophone Dreams #35. Much more recently, for this column, I asked Jim how he ended up making equipment for audiophiles.

"It all started about 30 years ago when I was working on a project at Hughes Aircraft, when a colleague mentioned that his dad (Milo Nestorovic) wanted to retire his audio company and would I be interested in buying it. Not something I was ready for, but it got me to thinking, everyone who understood vacuum tubes was either retiring or dead.

"During the entire 1990s, I studied everything I could about tubes and tube amplifiers, planning to do guitar amplification. I was keen to set up my own shop but felt unqualified to take on Nestorovic. Then I got tripped up by Allen Wright's Tube Preamp Cookbook, in which he explained the rationale for the 3.18µs zero required for proper phono playback (footnote 6). Damn, he was right. That led to my infamous RIAA Filter paper (footnote 7). But I felt I needed another stepping stone, so I designed and built the VacuTrace vacuum tube curve tracer (footnote 8).

"Eventually, instead of heading down the path of guitar amplifiers, I chose the most difficult of all: a tubed phonostage! My Trumpet was introduced circa 2001 and became an instant hit. It employed a fully balanced differential tube architecture from input to output, including power supplies. The Cornet was a single-ended tube version of the same topology for lower cost, and the Bugle an op-amp–based implementation. All of them employed passive-split EQ."

Recently, Hagerman has turned to transimpedance, or current-mode, devices, which respond to current instead of voltage and work best with phono cartridges with low internal impedance—including the Piccolo Zero head amp. It's a head amp, not a phono stage; think of it as equivalent to a step-up transformer, although the technology is completely different. It is intended to be used with a moving magnet phono preamp.

I asked Hagerman what could make one transimpedance amp sound different than another.

"Besides a very low noise figure, input bias current is of primary importance. You need to keep DC current off the cartridge coil to minimize magnetic offset. JFET types seem appropriate but have a lot of noise in current mode and are not a good choice. Keep in mind, we're working with about 50µA of signal current. Power supply noise is also important, and I employ multiple stages of passive filtering."

I've been wrestling with, trying to understand, the electrodynamics of zero-ohm loads, so I asked Jim: How stable can a zero-ohm input be?

"I don't believe it is difficult to maintain a close-to-zero-ohm input impedance for the Piccolo Zero over the audio band. You just let the op-amp do all the work! (footnote 9)

"A big issue with current-mode phono stages is hum. With a zero-ohm phono stage, you end up creating a shorted loop with the turntable cables, where any loop area becomes a loosely coupled secondary winding to any stray magnetic field from a nearby power transformer. It is not the Piccolo Zero that picks up hum (being DC powered); it is the turntable cables! At such high gain, it doesn't take much."

For my auditions, I decided to keep two things constant: Dynavector's XX-2 moving coil, which has an internal impedance specified at 6 ohms and output rated at 0.28mV, and MoFi's gain-adjustable MasterPhono preamplifier. Not changing those variables allowed me to focus specifically on the current-drive experience. The rest of the system was all old friends: HoloAudio's Serene preamp feeding the Elekit TU-8900 amplifier, driving DeVore Fidelity's Orangutan O/93s. Everything was connected with Cardas Clear Beyond wire.

Listening: Before installing Hagerman's current-drive head amp, I had been using the Dynavector cartridge into the current-drive input of the MoFi MasterPhono phono preamp set at 50dB gain. I planned it this way so my music listening brain would not be derailed by the violence of a voltage-mode to current-mode switchover. Typically, changing from V-mode to C-mode phono stages jolts me into a place of detached listening, where I find myself watching the sound—trying to notice what current drive is doing that voltage drive wasn't.

Happily, my plan worked, and the MoFi-to-Hagerman switchover was barely noticeable. They sounded fundamentally similar, though the Zero showed a little more flesh and came on a little stronger and harder.

That observation was made with the Zero's gain set at "+4dBΩ" (the way it was set from the factory) and the MasterPhono's MM gain set at 50dB. At that setting, every recording the Zero presented felt distractingly overzealous. In order to relax the sound, move the volume control back a few notches, and feel less worried about phono stage headroom, I lowered the Piccolo Zero's gain to what the Hagerman calls "0dBΩ," which felt marginally more comfortable but still strong and punchy. That's how I used it during the rest of my listening.

After that adjustment, I felt like playing this 1967 EMI recording loud, because Polish pianist Egon Petri was a large man who, in 1936, performed Beethoven's Sonata No.24 in F Sharp Major with broad-shouldered god-of-thunder authority. This recording (EMI LP HQM 1112) rewards higher volumes with greater realism.

As I listened to Petri playing Liszt's Gnomenreigen (recorded in 1929), I realized that to sound as real as possible, these tracks needed to be played at a certain, exact volume, louder than I usually listen. Whenever I discovered the "just right" loudness, realism and focus became striking, wherein I enjoyed watching the measured pressures of Petri's fingers touching the keys and sensing the weight and dimensions of the piano's body. As an added wonder, with the Piccolo Zero, it was easy to ignore the background noise inherent in this early recording. When I bothered to notice it, it was sitting far off, like a thin veil hanging in the background, nicely separated from the meaty body of the recorded performance.

Best of all, the overt fidelity of this recording established its presence in my room, where it dutifully served its rightful purpose: leading my mind unhindered to Petri's way of playing the whole piano, his whole body controlled by his enormous mind. Petri's sublime Liszt was a chest grabber, and the Dynavector-Zero combo kept it that way.

During my listening, the Zero's most defining trait was the quick, raw, dynamic force it put behind everything it amplified, especially piano.

Music is beholden to rhythm for its power of seduction, and no artist I know wielded that power better than New Orleans maestro Roy Byrd, aka Professor Longhair. Need proof? Play "Mess Around" or "Tipitina" from his landmark 1978 album Live on the Queen Mary (Harvest LP SW-11790). This high-energy performance was recorded in March 1975 at a private party hosted by Paul and Linda McCartney on board that decommissioned ship.

With Hagerman's Piccolo Zero, the sound of my well-worn disc was brisk and clear with pedal-to-the-metal PRaT, realistic audience applause, and a naturally sweet, rich tone on the Professor's vocals.

Looking for a harder test, I played Astor Piazzolla's grand "The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (Tango Apasionado)" off Nonesuch's American Clavé Recordings (Nonesuch 3LPs 05597915297). This recording presents a profoundly evocative musical performance. I use it to see how clearly and deeply a record needle can peer into a recording. The first thing I noticed when I played it, listening through Ron Sutherland's 15 times more expensive SUTZ transimpedance head amp, was bass!

Listening with the SUTZ, I realized that Hagerman's Piccolo Zero and the current-drive MoFi leaned towards dry because they delivered less clarity and energy in the 75Hz to 300Hz region. For me, clarity and a sense of force and body from those musically critical octaves are what separates great systems from the merely good. The Piccolo Zero delivered them with force and body but struggled on the well-sorted clarity part. The Sutherland did not just make more bass or cleaner, tighter bass; it made bass with power and density.

The first thing I noticed, though, when I replaced the SUTZ with the Piccolo Zero was the difference in gain. The Sutherland was set for its highest of three gain settings, the Zero for the lowest of four, yet the Hagerman was still louder than the Sutherland.

The second thing I noticed was that, compared to the Sutherland SUTZ, the Piccolo Zero sounded lean of tone and overdamped, evidenced by a slight reduction in the length of reverb tails. This slight too-tightness was the Zero's most discernable weakness.

But the Zero preserved current drive's core beauty, which resides in how it quiets the space around instruments, which in turn makes images appear more fleshed out and 3D. Current drive's hash-free quiet generates a more waterlike transparency, which, in turn, endows the music with a deeper, less grainy clarity. Hagerman's Zero made quiet magic with the XX2; I see no reason it shouldn't do that with a wide range of less-expensive low-impedance moving coil cartridges.

If you have yet to explore current drive's unique sonic potential, now's a good time, and Hagerman's $249 Piccolo Zero presents a ridiculously good value, possibly the perfect place to start

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Footnote 4: ... or Così Fan Tutti Frutti. See discogs.com/master/135378-Squeeze-Cosi-Fan-Tutti-Frutti.

Footnote 5: Hagerman Audio Labs. Email: jim@haglabs.com. Web: hagtech.com.

Footnote 6: This is the so-called Neumann correction. See Keith Howard's discussion.

Footnote 7: See Hagerman's discussion of the issue at hagtech.com/pdf/riaa.pdf.

Footnote 8: See hagtech.com/pdf/vacutrace.pdf.

Footnote 9: The op-amp works by forcing the difference between its two inputs to zero.