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Allen Perkins: From Bicycles to Belt Drives

Theodore Roosevelt might have described Allen Perkins as someone who speaks softly and carries a big stick—or two. Before founding Immedia Distribution in 1990, and long before cofounding turntable manufacturer Spiral Groove in 2005, this soft-spoken designer of two award-winning turntables had begun a career as a jazz drummer.

I've known Allen Perkins for more than a decade, ever since the Bay Area Audiophile Society, of which I'm a member, contacted him about demonstrating one of his products. In all those years of talking to Perkins at audio shows, asking him questions, and…

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That January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Perkins met SOTA's owners and designers. "I said that I had the model that always did this and this and this," he recalled, "and told them that I had fixed mine. There was a dead silence. After a few seconds, the designer said, 'We've been working on that problem for two years and we couldn't solve it.' After I showed them what I did, they came to me the next day and asked if I could fix all the other 'tables they had loaned out at the show."

That spring, Perkins moved to the Bay Area to work with SOTA, at their factory in…

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"I know of no other cables that are made this way," Perkins told me. "For about eight years after the design came out, there weren't any machines that could make it. I never considered it a viable product because it had to be handmade in small quantities, and I only want to distribute products that I can deliver upon demand. I hate disappointing people. Now we can finally make cables in whatever quantities we need."

Perkins praised Roberding's unique, single-gauge, multistranded design, which is patented. The cable's geometry is claimed to dramatically lower skin-effect and time-…

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The more expensive SG1 has a bayonet armboard that lets the user change out tonearms in about 10 seconds, as quickly as changing a camera lens. This easily enables the use of different arms with different cartridges. The SG2 has the same armboard without the bayonet mount, and requires 10 minutes to swap arms. Each table has a 14"-diameter ring around the bottom of the 12"-diameter platter to accommodate the drive belt.

"The extra diameter increases the inertia on the platter eight times over what a standard 12" diameter gives," he claimed. "In my opinion, that's much better than adding…

Music in the Round #40

It seems only yesterday, but it's been 10 years since I began using the original Paradigm Reference Servo-15 subwoofer in my system. It was good then, and it still is, although a lot around it has changed. At first, I hooked it up via Paradigm's X-35 crossover, then via a Technics SH-AC500D surround processor, and finally to the subwoofer/LFE outputs of the various preamplifier-processors and A/V receivers I've used. Y'see, the Servo-15 is just a powered sub. It has an amp and a level control, but no crossover, no channel mixing, and no phase control. Just plug in the signal and it plays it…

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The subjective results with the PBK-1 were very good and satisfying, but, while easier to use and significantly less expensive, they were no better or worse than with the SVSound or Audyssey devices. Of course, the SUB 15 already contains the real guts of the Paradigm EQ system, so there should be no reason to even consider buying one of the other EQs. Measurement of the actual performance of the SUB 15 with PBK-1, using the XTZ Room Analyzer, revealed that: 1) there was no correctable modal behavior, 2) the response was flat within ±2dB from about 100Hz down to 15Hz (which is absolutely…

Music in the Round #40 Contacts

Sidebar 1: Contacts

Audyssey Laboratories, Inc., 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 233, Los Angeles, CA 90071. Tel: (213) 625-4300. Fax: (213) 625-4383. Web: www.audyssey.com.
Paradigm Electronics Inc., 205 Annagem Blvd., Mississauga, Ontario L5T 2V1, Canada. Tel: (905) 564-1994. Fax: (905) 564-8726. Web: www.paradigm.com.
SVSound, 6420 Belmont Avenue, Girard, OH 44420. Tel: (877) 626-5623, (703) 845-1472. Fax: (585) 486-1787. Web: www.svsound.com.

Music in the Round #40 Recordings In The Round

Sidebar 2: Recordings In The Round

JOHN HAMMOND: Rough & Tough
Chesky SACD346 (SACD)

John Hammond is a one-man acoustic blues show, and you might not expect that Chesky needed more than two channels to give us everything we need to hear him. Well, that ain't so. First, the ambience of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, in New York City's Chelsea, where Chesky has recorded for many years, is very friendly. Without obscuring any detail, it cradles the music in subtle reverberation so that you can savor the sounds as they fade. As would any experienced musician, Hammond seems to…

Bob Carver: Carving a Name For Himself

Although it was Thomas Edison who set the tone for technological development in the 20th century, with his intellectual sweatshop in New Jersey, it is the lone inventor who has always had a special place in the heart of the American public. Since the days of Samuel Colt, Eli Whitney, and Nikola Tesla, fortune and fame have awaited the genius tinkerer who emerges from his back yard with a better mousetrap, cotton gin, etc., etc.

Which brings me to 46-year-old Robert W. Carver: a physicist by training; the founder of two successful multi-million dollar consumer electronics companies, Phase…

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Atkinson: To return to loudspeakers, it came as quite a shock when I saw that the first Carver speaker was a planar design. Have you always been attracted to planars?

Carver: I've been attracted to a particular kind of soundstage that was described brilliantly by Harry Pearson years ago in The Absolute Sound. It was a soundstage that had front-to-back depth, extended in a large arc behind and around the speakers, and from time to time could actually produce sound images outside of the limits of the loudspeaker edges. It seemed, when I read that essay, that that was so absolutely correct.…