I never went to dental school, but I used to be friendly with a bunch of dental students. They always had the best parties: Everyone would gather around the nitrous oxide canister and laugh their asses off until they'd drop from oxygen deprivation. (CES is kind…
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You know what's the first thing they teach you in dental school? Don't ever say "Oops!" Even if you stick one of those hooked teeth scrapers through the patient's cheek, you don't say "Oops!" "Don't move!"? Yes. "Oops!"? No. That's the big day-one lesson—and given the cost of medical malpractice insurance today, a damn good one.
Both cartridges use a highly polished Ogura PA line-contact diamond stylus. In the Clavis, the diamond's short, square shank is precision mounted and glued into the cantilever via a laser-cut square hole claimed to be the world's smallest. (It measures just 60 microns by 60 microns.) The result is said to be the lowest-mass tip in the world. The AudioQuest's solid-boron cantilever has a "slice"—a channel made in its tip—and the shank is inserted and glued there. Because of the mounting technique, the Fe5's shank is somewhat longer than that of the Clavis.
The stylus profile is not as…
The original Clavis and the 7000 nsx used long pole-pieces and a very strong magnet to generate a reasonably high output signal with extremely low distortion. The 7000 Fe5 uses a similar arrangement. The Clavis DC, however, offers a radical departure from that scheme in that there are no pole-pieces. There is a similarly shaped structure to anchor the cantilever assembly, but it does not function as a magnetic flux transmitter. Instead, two powerful disc magnets are threaded on the cantilever assembly, with one replacing the back "pole-piece" and one the front "pole-piece." The gap is…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: low-output moving-coil cartridge featuring a boron cantilever; low-mass Ogura PA line-contact stylus; "five nines" FPS (Functionally Perfect Silver) silver coils; "five nines" iron core. Internal impedance: 2.5 ohms. Recommended vertical tracking force (VTF): 1.8–1.85 grams. Compliance: 9cu. Weight: not specified. Channel separation: not specified. Frequency response: not specified. Output: 0.4mV (5cm/s, 45° peak). Recommended load: 200 ohms–47k ohms.
Serial number of unit reviewed: F7432.
Price: $2550 (1996); no longer available (2007).…
Sidebar 2: Mikey's System
To compare cartridges I used two different tonearms on the VPI TNT Mk.3: the Graham 1.5t unipivot, and the Rockport Capella air-bearing linear tracker, which is silicone-damped horizontally. (Such damping is a must, in my opinion, for any linear-tracker to perform properly with a high-performance cartridge.)
With the Graham's interchangeable arm tubes, changing cartridges took but a few minutes. It would normally take somewhat longer to switch cartridges in the Rockport; however, since both the AudioQuest and the Lyra Clavis DC place the stylus tip the…
Conventional wisdom has it that large Japanese corporations are insular. But when it comes to audio, Sony bucks the conventional wisdom as much as it does in pretty much everything it does. In Europe, the company has long had an excellent reputation for producing loudspeakers using local design talent, so I wasn't surprised to see Sony launching a line of American-designed and -made speakers at Stereophile's 1994 High-End Hi-Fi Show in Miami. Stereophile writer Barry Willis came away from that Show raving about the Sonys: "What we heard was gorgeous, absolutely beautiful: rich, warm, and deep…
In short, Stanhope's A Virtuoso Recital is a great pianism-showpiece album in excellent sound. The Rachmaninoff Preludes go a long way toward offsetting the "empty calories" pieces, and Stanhope's Sibelius transcription is a treasure. Highly recommended.
Audionet SAM V2 integrated amplifier: $4400
Last time out, I profiled ESP's Concert Grand SI loudspeakers in the context of a stereo system that, all-in, came perilously close to costing $100,000. I don't apologize for that. There are people shopping for $40,000/pair loudspeakers, and I believed they would benefit from learning…
"A few of us felt that we were the proverbial voices in the wilderness for a long time." So writes Gary Jacobson, whose Quad ESL website, is my favorite of the many good ones out there.
Like other Quad mavens, Jacobson didn't set out to become an authority on vintage loudspeakers: He was simply captivated by the first pair of ESLs he heard, and his enthusiasm only grew over the years, bringing him to an even more serious level of involvement. Today, Jacobson's site is a clearinghouse for information on buying, maintaining, repairing, and using Quad's original electrostatic loudspeaker,…
So with a nod of thanks and admiration for the invaluable restoration information provided by Gary Jacobson—and other Quad ESL experts, such as Ken Kessler (author of Quad: The Closest Approach), Sheldon Stokes, Stewart Penketh, Andrew King, Ron Best of One Thing Audio, Wayne Picquet, Mike Grubb and Randy Stringer of QS&D, my old friend Chris Beeching, and the great Philip O'Hanlon—let's get cracking.
The Visible Quads
An important tip, for safety's sake: There are very high voltages inside any electrostatic loudspeaker, and if you spend your lunch hour poking around inside an…
Larger than a stocking stuffer, Musical Fidelity's X-Rayv3 CD player is nevertheless quite compact and would be very nice to find under the Christmas tree.
At $995, the X-Rayv3 matches Musical Fidelity's X-150 integrated amplifier in size and price. (I reviewed the X-150 back in May.) There's also an X-80 integrated amp rated at 40Wpc into 8 ohms, vs 75Wpc for the X-150. I'd have reviewed the X-80, too, but I didn't want to rattle the cages of the "inmates" on the Internet. (They know who they are.)
Audio nerds might turn up their noses at this gear because of the small size. That…