Turntable Reviews

Sidebar 1: System

My reference system is not what I'd expect the prospective Comet purchaser to own. Much to its credit, however, the Comet was not intimidated by the lofty components with which it shared shelf space. In fact, it acquitted itself quite well (more about that later). The phono signal from my reference turntable—a Well-Tempered Turntable sporting the new Black Damped Platter, with a Roksan Shiraz MC cartridge strapped to the arm—is handled by Counterpoint's impressive, two-chassis SA-9 Isolinear Phono Equalizer. Since the SA-9 has inputs for both MM and MC cartridges, it was relatively easy to switch back and forth between the Comet and the WTT.

From the SA-9, the signal was routed to either Sonic Frontier's SFL-1 preamplifier or a line-level input on VTL's Ultimate preamp, which passed it on either to a pair of Manley Reference 100W/200W Triode Switchable Monoblock amplifiers or to Ensemble's Corifeo 100Wpc stereo amp. The signal ended at the binding posts of a pair of Mirage M-3si loudspeakers. RSC Master or Discovery Cable interconnect from TARA Labs was used throughout the system, with TARA's RSC speaker cable being the last link.—Guy Lemcoe