SAT supplies a pair of clampable counterweights of brass with soft alloy inlay—which you use will depend on the mass of your cartridge. To set the vertical tracking force (VTF), slide the counterweight along the arm's rear stub until you're close to the desired force, then lock it down with an Allen key. A lockable, weighted screw that protrudes from the end of the stub permits easy, precise fine-tuning of VTF.
Setup
The SAT tonearm comes in a Pelican case, each of its components nestled in a cutout of high-density foam. Also supplied are Allen keys, a tool for adjusting the bearing pre-load, and other assorted hardware—including, etched in aluminum, a Löfgren-alignment cartridge-overhang gauge inscribed with the stylus arc and grids at the two null points. Three machined spindle inserts of differing interior diameters ensure minimal slop of the gauge when placed on the turntable's platter. The arm's specified pivot-to-spindle distance is 212.2mm, its overhang 22.8mm, for a total effective length of 235mm—the same as that of the Graham Engineering's standard Phantom, and 4mm shorter than those of the Continuum Cobra, the Rega Research, and other arms. The offset angle is specified as 26.1°. Marc Gomez has chosen null points of 80 and 126mm instead of the more commonly used 66 and 121mm. Thus, as I found out, you can use only his gauge to set cartridge overhang. From SAT's website: "Custom alignment templates to match your specific preferences, available upon request."
Gomez was kind enough to produce a review sample with an arm pillar of diameter small enough that it could be dropped into the Kuzma 4Point base installed on my Continuum Caliburn turntable's secondary arm mount. The SAT's narrow cartridge-mounting slots and thick headshell required the use of SAT's supplied bolts.
In short order, I installed and aligned a Lyra Atlas cartridge in the SAT's headshell. Unfortunately, even with the arm pillar lowered almost fully into the base, the Lyra's SRA was higher than was optimal—but this is a problem peculiar to my setup. It was time to play some tunes.
I'm So Glad . . .
. . . I don't regularly foam at the mouth about every good product that comes my way for review, or declare every new one "the best" until the next comes along. Even when I think that, I tend to hold back. In fact, one reader read my very positive review (in the January 2006 issue) of the Continuum Caliburn, bought one, and thought I'd been holding back. He admonished me: "It's much better than you wrote."
This time I won't hold back. With the very first record I played on the Swedish Analog Technologies tonearm, it was immediately obvious to me that the SAT was easily, and by a wide margin, the finest, non-sounding tonearm I have ever not heard. The SAT's sound quality so far exceeded, in every parameter, that of any other arm I've heard—including the Continuum Cobra and VPI's JMW Memorial arm.
I had never heard the Lyra Atlas sound as it did when mounted in the SAT—nor had I ever heard Ortofon's Anna cartridge sound as it did when I heard it in Sweden in February, in the SAT arm on Rui Borges's RB turntable. In fact, the SAT fundamentally and dramatically changed and improved the sound of my system in ways I had not imagined a tonearm could, because no other tonearm has. No other cartridge has produced this level of improvement.
I'd thought my days of "I'm hearing things I've never heard before" were way behind me. Wrong. The first week the SAT was installed, I was up late every night, playing very familiar records, laughing out loud in delight at what I heard. I'd thought that, at best, today's best audio gear could produce only incremental improvements in sound quality, subtle shifts one way or another—never did I expect to hear the sonic seismic shift produced by this arm.
Even with the best gear, there are usually trade-offs—as with Boulder Amplifiers' 2008 phono preamplifier, which produced dynamics and detail I'd never before heard from familiar records, but at the cost of a dry, analytical quality that some didn't like, or that required reining in with a slightly soft-sounding cartridge. Ditto the Rockport Technologies tonearm, which also sounded on the dry, analytical side of neutral.
With the SAT, there were no trade-offs. It suppressed both impulse (pops, clicks) and steady-state (surface) noise better than any tonearm I've heard—but that was minor compared to its other strengths. From top to bottom, the SAT was the fastest, most frequency-extended arm I've ever heard—yet it managed that without sounding at all analytical. We usually think of "slow" bass as having greater texture, but at the expense of detail; and "fast" bass as having greater transient detail, but at the expense of warmth and texture. But bass passed along by (rather than produced by) the SAT was, by a wide margin, the fastest, most extended, most precise, most nimble—and, especially, well -textured—I've ever heard, here or anywhere. It was as if the bottom-end response of my Wilson Audio Alexandria XLF speakers had been retuned—and their bass was very good to begin with. The "starting and stopping" of musical notes, along with retention of textures, were so improved that I found something new and worth appreciating at the bottom end of every familiar record—improvements that ranged from the smallest microdynamic gestures to the largest bass explosions.
Image three-dimensionality, front-to-back layering of those images, soundstage and image focus, overall transparency—all reached previously unimaginable levels of resolution. So did microdynamic scaling—the ability to resolve small-scale shifts in volume. All in the context of fundamentally correct and coherent attack, sustain, and decay.
The SAT arm gave me a new definition for the phrase transient attack. I used to evaluate transient attacks using scales of from soft to hard and from fast to slow. The SAT rendered those scales meaningless. It passed along transients cleanly and precisely, more like tape than a stylus in a groove, these transients sounding neither etched nor softened, but with their edges convincingly defined. The SAT didn't sound as if it were selectively suppressing or accentuating anything in the realms of time or amplitude. Such harmonic wholeness presented me with reproductions of the sounds of pianos, brass, strings, percussion, and voices that held together with a singularly full, dense richness.
How many times have I heard "Gimme Shelter," from the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed? Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton (the latter recorded separately in L.A., after the original sessions) were now layered from front to back, each in a specific, definable space that I'd never heard before. There was Jimmy Miller's familiar, always-audible guiro, but now I could "see" and hear its hollowness, and the precision of the stick as it strikes each serration in the gourd was considerably improved while still sounding entirely woody. Later, when the maracas enter, I could hear the beans shaking around inside those gourds with unprecedented texture and weight. Multiply such examples by every one of the dozens of LPs I listened to through the SAT, and the total improvement it wrought in the quality of my listening was overwhelming—day after day, and late into every evening.
After all these years, and considering the precision of playback my system had already attained, I hadn't thought there was any room left for further astonishment. Wrong again. Last night I compared versions of Elvis Costello's King of America: the original Columbia, cut at Precision, S.F.; the F-Beat and Demon UK pressings; the Japanese pressing; and Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's recent 180gm edition. The MoFi is the best, the American Columbia sounds as if the great analog master was transferred to PCM with a Sony 1630 before cutting, the F-Beat sounds analog, the Demon just sounds blah.
Jerry Scheff's double bass in "Brilliant Mistake" seems overpowering even on the best rigs. The SAT/Continuum/Lyra put it and the entire ensemble in focus and in space as I'd never heard it. Scheff's electric bass in "Lovable" had never sounded this wonderfully gnarly and wiry and three-dimensional. I almost jumped out of my seat. I could hear these differences from all of these pressings, but they "popped" completely with the MoFi. With the F-Beat and MoFi: the rapid-fire kick drum and sticks at the end of "Glitter Gulch"? Never heard it like that. The marimba in "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"? Never heard it like that. The acoustic guitars throughout the album? Never heard them like that. And so on.
I'd never heard most of what I've played in the last few weeks "like that"—which was why, at the end of each of those late-night listening sessions, I laughed in delight.
I like saying to people, "The folks who invented this playback system had no idea how good it could be. Now, at last, we know."
Evidently, we still don't know—but thanks to Swedish Analog Technologies, I now know a great deal more than I did before.
Unfortunately, the SAT arm costs $28,000.
The SAT tonearm comes in a Pelican case, each of its components nestled in a cutout of high-density foam. Also supplied are Allen keys, a tool for adjusting the bearing pre-load, and other assorted hardware—including, etched in aluminum, a Löfgren-alignment cartridge-overhang gauge inscribed with the stylus arc and grids at the two null points. Three machined spindle inserts of differing interior diameters ensure minimal slop of the gauge when placed on the turntable's platter. The arm's specified pivot-to-spindle distance is 212.2mm, its overhang 22.8mm, for a total effective length of 235mm—the same as that of the Graham Engineering's standard Phantom, and 4mm shorter than those of the Continuum Cobra, the Rega Research, and other arms. The offset angle is specified as 26.1°. Marc Gomez has chosen null points of 80 and 126mm instead of the more commonly used 66 and 121mm. Thus, as I found out, you can use only his gauge to set cartridge overhang. From SAT's website: "Custom alignment templates to match your specific preferences, available upon request."
Gomez was kind enough to produce a review sample with an arm pillar of diameter small enough that it could be dropped into the Kuzma 4Point base installed on my Continuum Caliburn turntable's secondary arm mount. The SAT's narrow cartridge-mounting slots and thick headshell required the use of SAT's supplied bolts.
In short order, I installed and aligned a Lyra Atlas cartridge in the SAT's headshell. Unfortunately, even with the arm pillar lowered almost fully into the base, the Lyra's SRA was higher than was optimal—but this is a problem peculiar to my setup. It was time to play some tunes.
I'm So Glad . . .. . . I don't regularly foam at the mouth about every good product that comes my way for review, or declare every new one "the best" until the next comes along. Even when I think that, I tend to hold back. In fact, one reader read my very positive review (in the January 2006 issue) of the Continuum Caliburn, bought one, and thought I'd been holding back. He admonished me: "It's much better than you wrote."
The SAT arm gave me a new definition for the phrase transient attack. I used to evaluate transient attacks using scales of from soft to hard and from fast to slow. The SAT rendered those scales meaningless. It passed along transients cleanly and precisely, more like tape than a stylus in a groove, these transients sounding neither etched nor softened, but with their edges convincingly defined. The SAT didn't sound as if it were selectively suppressing or accentuating anything in the realms of time or amplitude. Such harmonic wholeness presented me with reproductions of the sounds of pianos, brass, strings, percussion, and voices that held together with a singularly full, dense richness.
How many times have I heard "Gimme Shelter," from the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed? Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton (the latter recorded separately in L.A., after the original sessions) were now layered from front to back, each in a specific, definable space that I'd never heard before. There was Jimmy Miller's familiar, always-audible guiro, but now I could "see" and hear its hollowness, and the precision of the stick as it strikes each serration in the gourd was considerably improved while still sounding entirely woody. Later, when the maracas enter, I could hear the beans shaking around inside those gourds with unprecedented texture and weight. Multiply such examples by every one of the dozens of LPs I listened to through the SAT, and the total improvement it wrought in the quality of my listening was overwhelming—day after day, and late into every evening.
After all these years, and considering the precision of playback my system had already attained, I hadn't thought there was any room left for further astonishment. Wrong again. Last night I compared versions of Elvis Costello's King of America: the original Columbia, cut at Precision, S.F.; the F-Beat and Demon UK pressings; the Japanese pressing; and Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's recent 180gm edition. The MoFi is the best, the American Columbia sounds as if the great analog master was transferred to PCM with a Sony 1630 before cutting, the F-Beat sounds analog, the Demon just sounds blah.
