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But there's "quite liveable" and then there's "YEAH!" In comparison with similarly priced analog setups, the WTRP/Blue Point Special combo sounds terrific, offering truly high-end sound for under two grand. The $6000 Linn rig, however, offers a much more detailed, rhythmically powerful, rock-solid sound. That's why, when I reviewed eight promising affordable cartridges in Vol.16 Nos.3 and 4, I used the Linn rig as my He-Man reference. Because while the best cartridge of the bunch, the Sumiko Blue Point Special, sounded better than even the best digital I've heard yet when mated with the WTRP…
As for the two cartridges' HF performance, the Klyde had a bit more emphasis in the low treble and a brighter, more cutting high end than the Blue Point Special, which sounded smoother and more musically natural. The Klyde had very good HF detail, but at the expense of a degree of sibilance that the less expensive cartridge was free of. On some recordings, the Klyde's more tipped-up low treble gave it a more detailed and forward character, but the added bite that went along with it stuck out in comparison with the Sumiko's smoother yet no less detailed high end. And in terms of throwing up…
The Basik LP12 most closely resembles the Linn's original incarnation. The motor, a 60Hz synchronous AC job not that much different from what used to come in the AR turntable, is plugged directly into the wall AC. The Basik's motor—and thus its belt, platter, arm, cartridge, and eventually the speaker cones—has to deal directly with frequency jitter and other hash riding on the never-clean, never-precise AC line. The soft belt supplies a measure of low-pass filtering to reduce the effects of all the junk on the AC, but some of it still manages to get through to affect the platter's moment-…
Sidebar 1: Review System
The Linn Klyde cartridge and LP12 'table were auditioned in my He-Man reference rig. The phono stage was mostly an Exposure Model XVII preamp with moving-coil board installed; a Sonic Frontiers SFP-1 phono stage (footnote 1) was used briefly toward the end of the review period. The Melos SHA-1 headphone amp was used as a line stage, joined at various times by my own buffered passive preamp and the Exposure XVII's own line stage. Amplification evolved from a pair of VTL Deluxe 225 tube amps at the start of the review period to the solid-state Aragon 4004 Mk.II and…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Linn Klyde: Low-output moving-coil phono cartridge. Tracking force: 1.55–1.75gm. Compliance: 10cu. Recommended load: greater than 50 ohms. Output at 5cm/s at 1kHz: 150µV. Stylus: Vital. Weight: 8gm. Separation at 1kHz: greater than 30dB. Channel balance at 1kHz: within 0.5dB. Recommended arm: rigid, medium mass. Can you use a non-Linn arm? Wal sure ye KIN, laddie, bu' why wou' ye use innythin' bu' a LINN, ya git?!
Price: $1095.
Linn Sondek LP12: Belt-drive two-speed turntable in Basik, Valhalla, and Lingo versions.
Prices: LP12 Basik: $1395–$1495,…
Wandering through Tower Records the other night, I was struck by the amazing diversity of music available to us. There's music from every part of the globe, for every taste and interest, from "show-me-the-good-parts" compilations of classical highlights to obscure releases by unknown artists. There's music for the ecstatic, music for the angry, music for the straight, the gay, the bent, and the twisted. The subcategories replicate like rabbits, as if in a demographer's nightmare. Genus spawn species, which quickly mutates into subspecies, race, tribe: cult begets subcult.
The rock…
It is a widely held belief that musicians do not assess hi-fi equipment in the same way as "audiophiles." I remember the British conductor Norman Del Mar—an underrated conductor if ever there was one—still being perfectly satisfied in 1981 with his 78 player, never having felt the need to go to LP, let alone to stereo. And some musicians do seem oblivious to the worst that modern technology can do. I was present at the infamous Salzburg CD conference in 1982, for example, where Herbert von Karajan, following one of the most unpleasant sound demonstrations in recorded history, announced that…
Then here's the game. The student takes the one that's less good and he gets to do anything to it to improve its performance. He wants to put in better transistors, fine. He wants to put in feedback, fine. He wants to take feedback away, fine. He wants to change the capacitors, the resistors, he has absolute carte blanche. Then he iterates. The intention is to leapfrog—only the problem is, there's never been any leapfrog; in three or four iterations, the tube unit has always come out on top. The students have tried various things on the transistor unit, but it simply doesn't begin to come…
Boyk: Absolutely. The analog machine also makes some difference, and although one can say until blue in the face that the digital machine made a bigger difference, you can't quantify that. If you could, it would be all done, we wouldn't need to worry about this stuff. So the only criterion that one can meaningfully use is to examine which comes closest to the direct feed in allowing the listener to get into the emotion of the music. It is the only conceivable criterion, because that is the purpose of what you're doing; that's what music is for. To use any other criterion is intellectually…
I think this record will be twiddling its thumbs five years from now, waiting for equipment manufacturers to make real systems for real people—as opposed to special custom-made commercial systems—that can actually play it. It's not hard to track, but the tough part is to reproduce the full power in the bass and midbass. There are very few systems around that can actually do that. The dynamic peaks are tremendous, +19dB over zero recording level. The cutter can legitimately put more energy in the groove, but Sax is a world-renowned expert in disc-cutting and he knows what real-world…