Astute readers will notice that I haven't yet mentioned the Lyra Titan i—and that points to another example of the unpredictability of current-mode phono preamps: Through the Little Loco, the Lyra played music and didn't hum much, but fell flat in the same areas the other cartridges excelled. The Titan i is an excellent cartridge and is pretty forgiving with respect to load and gain, so its failure is hard to understand—a sobering reminder that you have to try a cartridge with the Little Loco to know whether it will work.
Loco listening
With the Little Loco in place of my reference Sutherland PhonoBlock Refined phono preamp and with the Benz Micro SL installed in my tonearm, the first album I queued up was a recording of Corelli's Concerti Grossi by the Slovak Chamber Orchestra (Crossroads 22 16 0198). Through the Little Loco, the music consisted of beautiful, flowing lines in an expansive, enveloping soundstage. The instruments sounded natural, and each projected what seemed an infinite well of inner detail: They were clearly defined as distinct, three-dimensional images within the surrounding space. The Little Loco's portrayal of this space was striking, with an openness and transparency beyond anything I've heard before. The spaces between the images were much more obvious and significantly larger, especially deeper.
There was a lovely lightness to the musical flow, a sense of air moving around me, as with live music. It was different from the smooth liquidity and ever-so-slightly viscous character I hear from even the best phono preamps. The phrase "lightness of being" popped into my head, and I realized that it was a perfect description of what I was hearing.
Eventually, I found the discipline to drag myself away from the music and begin sorting out the elements of the Little Loco's better-than-best performance. Underpinning everything else, the Little Loco was silent. I don't mean it was quiet, incredibly quiet, or preternaturally quiet, as other Sutherland phono preamps are; this was something else altogether. When nothing was happening, the Little Loco was silent, as if it had turned completely off.
When I listened critically to the Little Loco's flowing musical lines, I realized that my system was resolving temporal information at a much finer level than with my reference phono preamp. I was aware of notes starting and stopping within continuous lines being played by each of the instruments in the Slovak Chamber Orchestra. The initial and final dynamic transients of notes were portrayed so finely and precisely that I was hearing impossibly brief silences between immediately subsequent passages and individual notes within a passage. Even the smallest dynamic transients were articulate in a way that caught me off guard. At the other end of the spectrum, the explosive, out-of-nowhere chops in Rickie Lee Jones's rendering of "Under the Boardwalk" on her EP Girl at Her Volcano (Warner Brothers 1-23805) were even more explosive with the Little Loco but not the least bit harsh or edgy—with a fine delicacy at their very first and last edges that seemed right. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the cartridge and Little Loco were extracting more information from any given slice of time, akin to how half-speed mastering puts more information into a given slice of time.
An album I use to test how well a component handles big, blazing-fast dynamic transients amid a dense ambient environment is Friday Night in San Francisco, a recording of a live performance by Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucïa (CBS HC47153). Playing it through the Little Loco exceeded any expectations I might have had.
I switched my focus to the Little Loco's handling of spatial information. I returned to the open, expansive soundstage surrounding those first few flowing lines. The soundstage created by the Little Loco was unfathomably large. My system had been creating soundstages that typically stretched to perhaps a foot beyond the speakers. Installing the Little Loco was like flipping a switch, instantly extending the edges another 2' out on each side.
Less obvious but even more striking was the way the Little Loco opened up the sounds of performance or recording spaces. Imagine looking out across canyons and meadows through a large, crystal-clear set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors . . . then opening the doors and walking out. The difference was most striking with acoustic performances recorded in large spaces. One that merited a few notepad pages of fawning praise was a Decca Jubilee recording of Friedrich Gulda performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1 in C, with Horst Stein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Decca JB 39). The sense of space captured on the recording was beyond reproach through my reference system. The Little Loco turned a key, liberating ambience cues and opening up an expansive, immersive space.
The glass-door analogy was apt for smaller spaces and those with denser ambiences as well. The recreation of San Francisco's Warfield Theater and the mayhem within Friday Night was a spectacular example. The dense, reverberant mélange of sounds that was there, the guitar pyrotechnics, the audience, and the insane, layered echoes from a mishmash of different surfaces were more detailed in space and time and felt thicker and more tangible. I wasn't in a wide-open space that stretched from here to infinity, but I still experienced the transition of walking out the door when the Little Loco was installed.
Another factor that contributed to the expansive, open character of the soundstage was its absolute transparency, which struck me as the spatial equivalent of the "it's turned off" silence I described earlier. If there'd been nothing between the performers when the recording was made, there was nothing between them in the Little Loco's soundstage. If the recording was made in a large, reverberant hall, I heard the hall's ambience in the spaces between the performers.
The images created with the Little Loco in my system were more solid and three-dimensional than with other phono preamps, and they had significantly more inner detail. There were finer and clearer microdynamic transients, for example, subtler shadings of pitch, and more nuanced variations in tempo from moment to moment. I often listen to what's going on within Emily Remler's guitar solo on the cut "Mistreated But Undefeated Blues" from The Ray Brown Trio's killer LP Soular Energy (Concord/Jazz LELP 111, Half-speed Mastered Edition). When moving from a very good preamp to a truly excellent one, her bending and flaring of notes went from merely noticeable to demanding attention. There's a level of inner detail and scale of dynamic transients that starts to distinguish the characteristics of individual strings. With the Little Loco, a completely new amount and level of detail was present. The image of her fingers on the strings now had depth and distinct spatial detail. What had sounded like the simple, linear decay of notes now had a choral nature that continued to develop as the notes faded away.
A thread running through everything I've read about current-mode phono preamps is that instruments sound "more like themselves." With the Little Loco, it was true in some ways but not in others. Instruments and voices had a clarity and purity that seemed truer to their nature than with other preamps. The Little Loco clearly, audibly removed veils of grit, smudging, distortion, haze, etc., that had been covering instruments and voices. It was most evident on the best recorded, most natural-sounding ones. The best instrumental example was János Starker's cello in the Mercury recordings of the complete Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. With the Little Loco, the instrument was so richly nuanced that even simple things like the resinous feel of the bow moving against a single string had a lifelike immediacy and glowing, in-the-room presence. As for a voice, the one I listened to over and over was Warren Zevon's on his eponymous 1976 album: There were moments when everything came together just so, and I felt I was in the room with him. The Little Loco didn't uncover more of these moments, but it turned the intensity of the existing ones up to eleven.
These two LPs were great examples of the one way that instruments and voices sounded less like themselves than with other top-tier phono preamps. For all their glorious inner detail and lifelike presence—for their incomparable, realistic immediacy—the timbre of instruments and voices was just a little too light through the Little Loco. Its low-frequency response was extended and had excellent pitch definition and detail, with no apparent shortage of impact. But the harmonic balance of Starker's cello, for example, lacked a bit of the weight and warmth it has with other superb phono preamps I've heard. It lacked the deep resonance of the real thing. The same was true for Zevon's vocals. Immediate, in the room, spooky lifelike—all true,yet the distinctive low growl that underpins everything just didn't have the weight and prominence I was used to. The Little Loco's timbre was slightly too light, to a degree that varied among the cartridges I used. Slightly. I can't imagine it preventing someone from being gaga over the Little Loco.
Okay, but why?
After listening to the Little Loco, I couldn't help asking Ron Sutherland: Why did he decide to build a current-input phono preamp? And, considering how staggeringly good its performance was, why did he wait so long?
"I only did it because a good friend who had one of the expensive ones told me I should build one," he replied. "I had no interest in doing it. . . . They were complex, and I didn't see any engineering advantages. I viewed them as gimmicks, or a thing that someone might do if they were desperate to differentiate themselves. I ignored him for a while (two or three years), but he just wouldn't let it go.
I thought about it from time to time, though, and then bang—one day it hit me, a way I could do it really simply, so I decided to give it a try."
"Want to tell me how the simple way works?" I asked.
"No," he replied. "I built a prototype. . . . I had no idea how, or even if it would work, but when I tried it, wow, I was shocked. Things just opened up. I'd never heard anything like it. So, I built a real one using the best of every thing. Cost was no object. Nothing was off the table. I was just building it for myself. I had no intention of making it a product. It made no sense. It was loco. But everyone that heard it loved it, so I started thinking about it. Then I beta'd it, and they all wanted to buy the prototypes. So that's it, the Phono Loco."
Would it be loco to buy a Little Loco?
If you're timid or wedded to a certain cartridge that you know won't work, then yes: It would be a little loco for you to buy a Little Loco. On the other hand, if you're willing to take a little time to find a cartridge that works well with this out-of-the-ordinary design and then live happily ever after, then buying a Little Loco wouldn't be at all, um, crazy. It might in fact be the best audio decision you ever made. My experience with the Little Loco convinced me that it wouldn't be hard to find a reasonably priced cartridge that sounded beyond incredible with it: I just tried what I had in my closet, and most of them worked beautifully—good enough to stop shopping then and there. The combination of the Little Loco and the $500 AT-OC9ML/II sounded as good as a $20,000 combination of my experience, in nearly every way—and better in some. With the $1600 Benz Micro SL, the Little Loco did things I've never heard my system do before. For my money, the Little Loco is the best way to spend $3800 on an audio system with an analog source.
With the Little Loco in place of my reference Sutherland PhonoBlock Refined phono preamp and with the Benz Micro SL installed in my tonearm, the first album I queued up was a recording of Corelli's Concerti Grossi by the Slovak Chamber Orchestra (Crossroads 22 16 0198). Through the Little Loco, the music consisted of beautiful, flowing lines in an expansive, enveloping soundstage. The instruments sounded natural, and each projected what seemed an infinite well of inner detail: They were clearly defined as distinct, three-dimensional images within the surrounding space. The Little Loco's portrayal of this space was striking, with an openness and transparency beyond anything I've heard before. The spaces between the images were much more obvious and significantly larger, especially deeper.
There was a lovely lightness to the musical flow, a sense of air moving around me, as with live music. It was different from the smooth liquidity and ever-so-slightly viscous character I hear from even the best phono preamps. The phrase "lightness of being" popped into my head, and I realized that it was a perfect description of what I was hearing.
Eventually, I found the discipline to drag myself away from the music and begin sorting out the elements of the Little Loco's better-than-best performance. Underpinning everything else, the Little Loco was silent. I don't mean it was quiet, incredibly quiet, or preternaturally quiet, as other Sutherland phono preamps are; this was something else altogether. When nothing was happening, the Little Loco was silent, as if it had turned completely off.
When I listened critically to the Little Loco's flowing musical lines, I realized that my system was resolving temporal information at a much finer level than with my reference phono preamp. I was aware of notes starting and stopping within continuous lines being played by each of the instruments in the Slovak Chamber Orchestra. The initial and final dynamic transients of notes were portrayed so finely and precisely that I was hearing impossibly brief silences between immediately subsequent passages and individual notes within a passage. Even the smallest dynamic transients were articulate in a way that caught me off guard. At the other end of the spectrum, the explosive, out-of-nowhere chops in Rickie Lee Jones's rendering of "Under the Boardwalk" on her EP Girl at Her Volcano (Warner Brothers 1-23805) were even more explosive with the Little Loco but not the least bit harsh or edgy—with a fine delicacy at their very first and last edges that seemed right. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the cartridge and Little Loco were extracting more information from any given slice of time, akin to how half-speed mastering puts more information into a given slice of time.
I switched my focus to the Little Loco's handling of spatial information. I returned to the open, expansive soundstage surrounding those first few flowing lines. The soundstage created by the Little Loco was unfathomably large. My system had been creating soundstages that typically stretched to perhaps a foot beyond the speakers. Installing the Little Loco was like flipping a switch, instantly extending the edges another 2' out on each side.
Less obvious but even more striking was the way the Little Loco opened up the sounds of performance or recording spaces. Imagine looking out across canyons and meadows through a large, crystal-clear set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors . . . then opening the doors and walking out. The difference was most striking with acoustic performances recorded in large spaces. One that merited a few notepad pages of fawning praise was a Decca Jubilee recording of Friedrich Gulda performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1 in C, with Horst Stein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Decca JB 39). The sense of space captured on the recording was beyond reproach through my reference system. The Little Loco turned a key, liberating ambience cues and opening up an expansive, immersive space.
A thread running through everything I've read about current-mode phono preamps is that instruments sound "more like themselves." With the Little Loco, it was true in some ways but not in others. Instruments and voices had a clarity and purity that seemed truer to their nature than with other preamps. The Little Loco clearly, audibly removed veils of grit, smudging, distortion, haze, etc., that had been covering instruments and voices. It was most evident on the best recorded, most natural-sounding ones. The best instrumental example was János Starker's cello in the Mercury recordings of the complete Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. With the Little Loco, the instrument was so richly nuanced that even simple things like the resinous feel of the bow moving against a single string had a lifelike immediacy and glowing, in-the-room presence. As for a voice, the one I listened to over and over was Warren Zevon's on his eponymous 1976 album: There were moments when everything came together just so, and I felt I was in the room with him. The Little Loco didn't uncover more of these moments, but it turned the intensity of the existing ones up to eleven.
These two LPs were great examples of the one way that instruments and voices sounded less like themselves than with other top-tier phono preamps. For all their glorious inner detail and lifelike presence—for their incomparable, realistic immediacy—the timbre of instruments and voices was just a little too light through the Little Loco. Its low-frequency response was extended and had excellent pitch definition and detail, with no apparent shortage of impact. But the harmonic balance of Starker's cello, for example, lacked a bit of the weight and warmth it has with other superb phono preamps I've heard. It lacked the deep resonance of the real thing. The same was true for Zevon's vocals. Immediate, in the room, spooky lifelike—all true,yet the distinctive low growl that underpins everything just didn't have the weight and prominence I was used to. The Little Loco's timbre was slightly too light, to a degree that varied among the cartridges I used. Slightly. I can't imagine it preventing someone from being gaga over the Little Loco.
Okay, but why?After listening to the Little Loco, I couldn't help asking Ron Sutherland: Why did he decide to build a current-input phono preamp? And, considering how staggeringly good its performance was, why did he wait so long?
If you're timid or wedded to a certain cartridge that you know won't work, then yes: It would be a little loco for you to buy a Little Loco. On the other hand, if you're willing to take a little time to find a cartridge that works well with this out-of-the-ordinary design and then live happily ever after, then buying a Little Loco wouldn't be at all, um, crazy. It might in fact be the best audio decision you ever made. My experience with the Little Loco convinced me that it wouldn't be hard to find a reasonably priced cartridge that sounded beyond incredible with it: I just tried what I had in my closet, and most of them worked beautifully—good enough to stop shopping then and there. The combination of the Little Loco and the $500 AT-OC9ML/II sounded as good as a $20,000 combination of my experience, in nearly every way—and better in some. With the $1600 Benz Micro SL, the Little Loco did things I've never heard my system do before. For my money, the Little Loco is the best way to spend $3800 on an audio system with an analog source.
