Turntable Reviews

In his review of the J.Sikora Initial turntable, Stereophile's resident artist/sage Herb Reichert wrote, "Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination."

When it comes to playing records, I too have a ritual. It involves carefully cleaning the vinyl, first on a Pro-Ject VC-33, followed by immersion in a HumminGuru Ultrasonic vinyl cleaner. Before and after, I inspect the record's grooves with a pricey VisibleDust Quasar R magnifier (footnote 1). Only then—black coffee hot, glasses cleaned, stylus brushed free of contaminants, notepad at hand—am I ready to receive the messages ingrained in a shiny black vinyl disc.

Writing equipment reviews is a similar meditation practice, involving varying degrees of focus, research, and critical listening before setting pen to paper—or, more likely, fingers to keyboard.

Traditions in place, I prepared to review the J.Sikora Standard Max Supreme Turntable ($38,500) and its matching KV9 Max Zirconium Tonearm ($11,750; discounted 10% when purchased with a J.Sikora turntable). After only a few spins, I came to some surprising preliminary conclusions.

An upgraded version of J.Sikora's Standard Max, the Standard Max Supreme is built like a heavy-metal layer cake, each massive section supporting another, from its oversized isolation platform to its 40lb Delrin platter and its massive record weight. The Standard Max Supreme was built up in my listening room piece by piece like the Great Pyramid of Giza, with almost as many workers needed to assemble it to its altar-like form. Almost as many.

The Supreme upgrade included material/metal changes in all areas of the turntable's design, following J.Sikora's practice of utilizing mass loading to control resonances. I asked Robert Sikora how his father, company founder Janusz Sikora, a metallurgist by trade, decided which metals to use in the Standard Max Supreme (SMS) and where they should go.

"The Standard Max Supreme contains unique combinations of metals and alloys," the younger Sikora replied, by email. "In the turntable suspension, aluminum elements of the Standard Max turntable have been replaced with brass. The separating layers at the base of the platter are now made of steel and solid brass plates. The motor housings, as in the [ J.Sikora] Reference turntable, are made of one centimeter–thick stainless steel, with improved internal damping. The bases of the motor housings are made of a two centimeter–thick layer of brass."

"A key element to the sound of J.Sikora's turntables is the specific combination of metals," Jeff Fox of Notable Audio, J.Sikora's US distributor, noted. "The Sikoras have 40 years of experience in the application of different metals. The Sikoras use that experience and countless hours of experimentation with various types, quantities, and location of metals in their turntable designs. All metals are sonorous, so each metal rings and has a specific pitch and decay. When using a metal in audio equipment, the size, thickness, shape, and patterns affect the sound. Think cymbals."

Material changes in the Standard Max Supreme extend to its new armboard, which is made of brass, steel, and aluminum. In the non-Supreme version, it's aluminum and steel.

"The use of these new materials in critical places enables the SMS to achieve an even higher level of information retrieval, with a greater degree of sonic purity than we thought possible when we started this project," Sikora wrote.

An inside look at the Standard Max Supreme's 2½" thick platter-support base reveals impressive composition—what J.Sikora calls "separating layers," four separate, 15mm-thick segments: a steel spider on top, supported by a solid brass/brass/steel sandwich that accounts for a big chunk of the SMS's colossal 216lb.

"The role of each layer is to create yet another stratum that helps to get rid of resonances," Sikora replied. "Each material has its own resonant frequency. The entire construction is attached to the plinth by screws." Combining materials with different resonant frequencies spreads resonances and lowers the peaks. "The goal was to trickle down as many of the sonic characteristics of the Reference 'table in the smaller form factor of the Standard Max Supreme"—although the Reference isn't that much heavier, at 238lb.

Design
Included in the SMS package is a record weight that weighs 6lb. Crafted from nickel-plated bronze and precisely sectioned into 20 discrete segments, with two rubber O-rings in its upper periphery, the record weight, too, was also designed to attenuate resonances. A solid brass disc drops into the weight's core, resulting in an aesthetic reminiscent of cooling towers at nuclear power plants.

The SMS, including its isolation platform, stands 25" wide × 16.25" deep × 13.5" high. Below the cooling tower (and the record you're playing) is a 10mm-thick graphite-glass platter, the material chosen, again, for vibration-damping properties. In the middle of the platter, surrounding a central steel spindle, is a 4.25"-diameter aluminum disc. That spindle is the visible part of a bearing mechanism that utilizes an inverted bearing with a ball made of zirconium dioxide nestled in a steel and cemented-carbide housing (footnote 2). The uppermost, glass platter rests upon a 4.5"-thick Delrin platter with a 14.5lb cast-iron ring embedded discreetly in its undercarriage.

"Cast iron has great [vibration] absorbing values, as does Delrin," Sikora explained. "Placing the cast iron ring in the bottom of the platter allows us to increase the mass of the platter and at the same time lower the center of gravity."

Beneath the 40lb Delrin platter, that quartet of four 15mm-thick "separating layers" combine to form a substantial metal sandwich. To further mitigate resonant frequencies, J.Sikora interposes two copper separator rods between the layers.

A plinth measuring 18" wide × 14" deep × 1.5" high, machined from a single billet of aluminum and finished in a high-gloss lacquer, supports the separating layers. Between the plinth and the considerably larger isolation platform, four complex feet are suspended on silicone pods. These feet are made of stainless steel and brass resting on zirconium dioxide balls that fit into brass pods. This arrangement is mirrored beneath the isolation platform, which is also machined from a single billet of aluminum and finished with high-gloss lacquer.

The SMS incorporates a pair of DC asynchronous motors engineered by EBM-Papst, each crowned with a CNC-machined anodized aluminum pulley and housed within 1cm-thick Inox stainless steel enclosures. The motors are decoupled from the casings with silicone and fixed with polyamide screws. In the Supreme version, these casings are anchored to 2cm-thick brass bases. Internal damping has been enhanced beyond the Standard Max with two proprietary damping foams inside the motor housings. Two rubber belts per motor—four total—transmit power from the opposing motors to the Delrin platter.

The KV9 Max Zirconium Series 9" Tonearm is a silicone-damped unipivot design featuring a Kevlar-fiber armtube that also uses J.Sikora's special damping foam. "Zirconium" is in the name because it uses a zirconia—zirconium dioxide, a hard ceramic—spike at the pivot. Sikora claims improved azimuth and counterweight adjustments due to more precise threading, relative to the standard KV tonearms. The arm's dual counterweights are made of brass and polyamide. The knurled VTA wheel is aluminum, as is the tonearm base. External and internal parts of the tonearm cylinder previously made of aluminum in the KV12 have been replaced with brass.

As noted earlier, the SMS armboard also enjoyed upgrades. The aluminum "pods"—the crucial rollers within the armboard—have been replaced by brass in the Supreme model, which is said to elevate the 'table/arm combination's sonic performance.

Finally, the Standard Max Supreme is bundled with the Reference Linear Power Supply from J.Sikora's Reference turntable. It consists of a single toroidal transformer with three banks of capacitors for current stabilization, housed in an aluminum enclosure measuring 6.25" wide × 13" deep × 7.5" high.

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Footnote 1: The Quasar is a photo loupe with a twist: It's made for finding dust on digital camera sensors.

Footnote 2: I looked it up so you won't have to: Cemented carbine is a mixture of metal carbides—typically tungsten carbine, titanium carbide, and tantalum carbide—with some kind of metal as a binder. It is notable for its hardness—for example, it is often used in tools intended to cut stainless and carbon steel. The point here, presumably, is to create a smooth surface that wears very slowly.