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Spin Doctor #21: the Kuzma Safir 9 tonearm
The British audio scene from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was pretty strange. Audio as a hobby was a big deal, with widespread appeal to a much younger crowd than today. Audiophiles were guided by a flurry of what my friends called "hi-fi pornos," audio magazines that filled the racks at the newsagents.
Footnote 1: Kuzma Ltd., Jelenceva 1, SI-4000 KRANJ, Slovenia. Tel: + 386 4 25 35 450 Email: kuzmaltd@siol.net Web: kuzma.si. US distributor: Elite Audio/Video Distribution, 4718 San Fernando Rd. Unit H, Glendale, CA 91204. Tel: (818) 245-6037. Email: scotlt@eliteavdist.com Web: eliteavdist.com
Far more than you see today, there was a strong nationalist bent, with some writers displaying an open bias against anything that wasn't British. Magazines' editorial departments presented readers with a clear, specific doctrine of how a system should be built and what components readers should acquire.
As a schoolboy with no system of my own, I lapped up these suggestions, and when I returned to the US in 1980 to attend university, I was finally able to start building a system that conformed to the system-building rules that had been drilled into me.
After I graduated four years later, I moved back to England for a year before returning to New York for good in 1985. Frustrated in my effort to find the right job in my fieldas a studio recording engineerI took what I figured would be a temporary job at the late Andy Singer's high-end audio store, Sound By Singer, which at the time was probably the most Anglophile of the New York City high-end audio stores. Nevertheless, it gave me an opportunity to listen to all manner of exotica, and I was quickly dispelled of my belief that only the British knew how to make proper hi-fi kit. Brands like Snell Acoustics, Vandersteen, Krell, and Audio Research crept into my psyche, and within a year I owned an Audio Research SP-11 Mk2 preamp and various other bits of domestic audiophilia. I did, however, continue to sneak back to Hotalings News Service for the latest imported hi-fi mags, to keep my Brit-fi interest alive.
Hotalings was a legendary international news stand located in the heart of the sleazy old Times Square long before the internet displaced most magazines and Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned out all the smut. Those copies of Hi-Fi News, Hi-Fi Answers, Hi-Fi for Pleasure, and Hi-Fi World helped me pass the time during my hour-long subway commute to and from Singer each day.
My "temporary" job at Singer ended up lasting nine years, and even after I moved on, in 1994, I continued to do freelance work for Andy until his sad passing in April 2024.
One article that grabbed my interest during one of those subway commutes was written by our own Martin Colloms. It appeared in the November 1985 issue of Hi-Fi News. He was reviewing a new tonearm called the Kuzma Stogi, which was made in Yugoslavia, of all places. Consumer goods that hailed from behind the Iron Curtain were rarely seen in the US, but they were common back in England. Things like Skoda cars from Czechoslovakia and Zenit cameras from Russia were seen as bottom of the barrel, ultracheap options for people with a limited budget who still wanted something new. They were never thought of as high-quality alternatives to Western products. That's what made Colloms's Stogi review so fascinating. He was obviously impressed. He said that the Stogi could deliver performance that competed with some of the top-class British arms of the time such as the Linn Ittok and Zeta. What's more, it benefited from the bargain pricing attached to Eastern Bloc goods. Kuzma wasn't available in the US, so I decided that on my next trip to the UK, I would buy one so I could check it out. At just £250about $340 in our own greenbacks at the timeit was about half the US price of a Linn Ittok.
In London, I arranged to buy the Stogi from a funky new hi-fi store with a funky name, The Cornflake Shop. They demonstrated it for me on another hot new product, a British turntable called the Roksan Xerxes, which was being hailed in the British magazines as the first turntable to seriously challenge the Linn Sondek LP12's supremacy. The performance of this pairing was truly ear opening. Within six months of my encounter with it in London, we were selling Roksan at Sound By Singer. Three years later, I was Roksan's North American sales manager, but that's a story for another day.
With my preconceptions about cheap Eastern Bloc goods in mind, I was curious how someone managed to make a product like the Stogi in Yugoslavia, which was still very much communist. As I discussed in Spin Doctor #9, dedicated audio enthusiasts behind the Iron Curtain found that where there's a will, there's a way: They somehow managed to get things done. Franc Kuzma was able to pull the strings necessary to procure top-quality Van den Hul wiring and precision Western ball bearings to use in the Stogi. He also knew when he didn't need to be that fussy: The arm was packed in a crumbly white Styrofoam that screamed low-rent, and the blurry single sheet of instructions used an Olde English font to deliver scant information.
Back in New York, I installed the Stogi on a Linn LP12 at Singer to gauge customer reactions. While it sounded good and worked well on the Linn, it wasn't until we got our hands on a Roksan Xerxes turntable a few months later that I was able to recreate the magic I had heard at The Cornflake Shop. I ended up using the Stogi at home on my own Xerxes for a couple of years before I started working for Roksan, at which point I switched to using the Roksan Artemiz arm.
Amazingly, the original Stogi is still made by Kuzma in a form that's nearly unchanged, although US importer Elite Audio/Video Distribution chooses not to offer that version, focusing instead on the upgraded Stogi Reference and Reference 313 and the cheaper Stogi S unipivot (footnote 1).
Nearly 40 years after my first encounter with Kuzma, the world is a very different place geopolitically. The Iron Curtain fell, and Yugoslavia split apart, making Kuzma a part of an independent, democratic Slovenia. Of all the former Iron Curtain countries, Slovenia has the highest per capita GDP, outpacing even some Western countries including Portugal and Greece and making it an ideal place to do business. Kuzma stuck doggedly to their core business, making only turntables, tonearms, cartridges, and a few related accessories.
Over the years, Kuzma has developed new tonearms with different types of bearing designs, including unipivot, linear air bearing, and the traditional gimbal ball bearings of the original Stogi. But it was the introduction of the 4Point arm in 2008 that truly demonstrated Franc Kuzma's out-of-the-box thinking and design chops. As its name suggests, the armtube assembly of the 4Point rests on four jeweled bearing points, two for the vertical pivot, and two for the horizontal. This hybrid approach gives you the advantages of a zero-clearance design like a unipivot combined with the stability of a traditional gimbal.
The 4Point was an instant success, garnering widespread praise for its sonic performance and ease of use. Soon, the original 11" 4Point was joined by an even longer 14" variation and, eventually, a simplified 9" version called the 4Point 9. The 4Point 9 was designed for use with smaller turntables that couldn't handle the size and weight of the longer versions. All have sold well, and I have installed dozens of them for owners here in the New York City area.
Footnote 1: Kuzma Ltd., Jelenceva 1, SI-4000 KRANJ, Slovenia. Tel: + 386 4 25 35 450 Email: kuzmaltd@siol.net Web: kuzma.si. US distributor: Elite Audio/Video Distribution, 4718 San Fernando Rd. Unit H, Glendale, CA 91204. Tel: (818) 245-6037. Email: scotlt@eliteavdist.com Web: eliteavdist.com
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