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For whatever reason, Roland Hanna wasn't blessed with the major career Tommy Flanagan had, though their playing was quite similar. Perhaps Hanna's "classical" touch was a bit more incisive or muscular, but it never was too heavy. Indeed, whereas Flanagan began as a clarinet player, Hanna studied classical piano as a boy, and went on to study at both Juilliard and the Eastman School. Just listen to the poignant rubato toward the end of "A Child Is Born," and then the way Hanna brings out Impressionist harmonies in Evans and Livingston's "Never Let Me Go."
Initial setup brought to light some quirks. One, the speaker terminals are set up for biwiring, so jumpers are required. Although the terminals are sourced from WBT, there's not enough clearance between the terminals' plastic hex nuts and the overhanging lip of the back of the integral stand's base to allow use of a standard speaker-lug wrench. So the nuts were never really tight. If I were buying these speakers, I'd get speaker cables terminated with banana plugs at the loudspeaker end, and use the lug nuts for the biwire jumper.
Another factor is that, obviously, a monitor speaker…
Ideally, LPs should be played with the pickup stylus remaining tangential (ie, at a 90° angle) to the groove—just as the lacquer from which the LP was ultimately stamped was cut in the first place. Over the years, many attempts have been made to accomplish this. Back in 1877, Thomas A. Edison's original machines tangentially tracked his cylinders, but Emil Berliner's invention of the flat disc put an end to cylinders altogether. In the 1950s, a number of companies marketed so-called "tangential" trackers that used dual arms, based on conventional pivoting arrangements, to change the angle at…
Rockport's Andy Payor eventually redesigned the 6000, changing its effective vertical mass to get the arm's resonant frequency within the optimal range. But by then I couldn't justify to myself the hassles and tradeoffs inherent in any so-called tangential-tracking arm. I think the amount of distortion added by a properly set up and well-designed pivoted arm is lower than what's added by the rest of a typical audio system.
The HiFiction Thales AV
Designed and manufactured by Micha Huber, a fastidious young Swiss mechanical engineer, musician, and watchmaker, the HiFiction Thales…
If you set your stylus rake angle (SRA) to 92° using an LP of medium thickness (150gm), that setting should suffice for all thicknesses of vinyl, given how much movement would be required at the rear end of the arm to produce a change in SRA of even 1°. If you set it by ear, just be careful, and tighten the grub screw when you're done.
Setting the antiskating force requires you to turn a disc on a threaded rod under the rear cardanic bearing. Here, again, you must exercise extreme caution. Without a test LP such as Telarc's out-of-print Omnidisc, setting antiskating on the Thales AV is…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Parallel-tracking, pivoted tonearm.
Price: $12,360.
Manufacturer: HiFiction AG, St. Gallerstrasse 20, CH-8352 Elsau, Switzerland. Tel: (41) 52-202-43-12. Web: www.tonarm.ch. US distributor: High Water Sound LLC, 274 Water Street 2F, New York, NY 10038. Tel: (212) 608-8841. Fax: (212) 571-5809. Web: www.highwatersound.com.
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Continuum Audio Labs Caliburn, Cobra, and Castellon turntable, tonearm, and stand; Audiostone Pythagoras turntable; Graham Engineering Phantom II tonearm; Ortofon A90, Lyra Titan i, Miyajima Premium BE (mono) cartridges.
Digital Sources: Playback Designs MPS-5 SACD/CD player-DAC, Camelot Roundtable Anagram Technologies DAC, BPT-modified Alesis Masterlink hard-disk recorder, Benchmark ADC1 A/D converter, Meridian Sooloos music server.
Preamplification: Einstein The Turntable's Choice, Boulder 2008, Esoteric E-03 phono preamplifiers;…
Why bother with three phono preamps most of us can't afford? For the same reason the enthusiast automobile magazines cover the newest Ferraris and Lamborghinis: just reading about them is fun.
All three of these expensive phono preamps I review this month—the Boulder 1008 ($12,000), Vitus Masterpiece Series MP-P201 ($60,000), and Abbingdon Music Research PH-77 ($11,995)—share certain sonic attributes not found in less costly, less ambitious units: all are free of "electronica" and glaze. Their edge definition of aural images is smoothly and naturally delineated. All three…
For instance, AMR's own website claims that the original Mercury Living Presence series used Decca/London's ffss (stereo) and ffrr (mono) curves. Yet the jacket of my original copy of Antal Dorati and the London Symphony performing Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges Suite (LP, Mercury Living Presence SR 90006, only the label's sixth stereo release) says that the record "should be played according to the RIAA standard"—as do all of the other Mercurys in my collection, both US and UK pressings. Ditto UK-pressed Deccas. AMR also claims that "original Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck" LPs on…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Tubed MM/MC phono preamplifier with one Direct Input with custom loading RCA socket, three Switchable Inputs, singled-ended, balanced, and USB outputs, 24/96-capable A/D converter, adjustable input impedance and capacitcance, and multiple equalization options. Tube complement: EZ80 (rectification), Mullard ECC81/12AT7 (1st gain stage), Philips 5687WB (2nd gain stage). Gain: 72, 66, 60, 54dB (MC Low); 48, 42, 36, 30dB (MM/MC High); Mute. Frequency Response: within ±dB of RIAA; 12Hz–95kHz +0.3/–3dB. Noise (A-weighted): below –145dBV (<0.056µV)…