With New York City temperatures rising into the high 90s this afternoon, there’s no doubt that summer has officially arrived. And summer means great live music. Ask Stereophile’s editorial assistant, Ariel Bitran, who returned to the office all bronze-skinned and bleary-eyed after attending the recent Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee. (He’s been wearing sandals ever since.) And, while I can understand and appreciate the desire to get…
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Twisted fire-starters atop Arcadia's Afterburner DJ booth. The Afterburner will make its North American debut at the Catalpa Festival in NYC.
London phono cartridges still carry the famous Decca name (even if only in parentheses), but they are now produced by John Wright, a precision engineer and ex-Decca employee. Wright (not to be confused with his IMF and more recent TDL loudspeaker-designer namesake) was assigned the rights in 1989 by Decca's Special Products division (footnote 1), when the company's new owner, Racal, decided that they didn't want to be involved in the manufacture of audio equipment. Wright worked for 20 years in Decca's phono-cartridge division, where he gained a wealth of experience. As well as manufacturing…
Some critics have described the standard Decca body as "'kin' plastic." In previous reviews, I had found structural resonance problems in the 200–300Hz region. The Jubilee's new body is precision-machined to be closefitting, and is quite inert. It also provides a clean, flat surface for mounting—complete with internal threads to take well-tensioned fixing bolts. The body mass is up from 4 to 10gm. This is a radical transformation, and should allow the "Positive Scanning" generator to operate to its best ability.
The Jubilee is fitted with the latest extended elliptical (or, more…
Sidebar 2: Colloms System
A trial with an undamped Linn Ittok tonearm wasn't promising, but my unmodified Naim ARO tonearm, which offers some mechanical damping, gave fine results. An SME V with high-rate damping provided the most secure tracking, while a discussion with London's UK distributor led me to try using the old London International unipivot arm (footnote 1). (This is an odd plastic-and-metal affair where you allow a couple of days for silicone damping fluid to find its way into a mysterious hidden damping well.)
My most successful trial was with the unipivot ARO mounted…
Sidebar 3: Michael Fremer on the London Reference, June 2005 (Vol.28 No.6):
The name had to be changed because of trademark issues, but this is the latest incarnation of the unusual and highly touted Decca cartridge that, in one form or another, has been around for decades. Everything I've ever read about this controversial design is true: It's one of the most alive, exciting, "direct-from-disc" cartridges I've ever heard. Once you've heard one of these doing what it does best, which is not everything, everything else sounds as if delivered via a tin can and string. (Okay, I'm…
Sidebar 4: Measurements
The Jubilee's frequency response (fig.1) was better than that of the older Decca designs. The omnipresent bass wiggles were now confined to a gentle rise toward 20Hz. Likewise, the 250Hz region was uniformly flat. There was just the gentlest of downward tilts, 0.5–0.75dB, from 100Hz to 5kHz. While the range above 5kHz was mildly perturbed (+1dB, –3.5dB), matters roughly balanced out over the final octave. Significant high-frequency resonances were held off until 24kHz.
Fig.1 London Jubilee, outer-band frequency response and channel separation…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: "Direct-Sensing" phono cartridge. Nominal output (1kHz, 5cm/s): 5mV. Recommended downforce: 1.8–2.2gm. Mass: 10gm. Recommended tonearm mass: medium (well-damped).
Price: $1600 (Jubilee, 1995); $4495 (Reference, 2005). Approximate number of dealers: 7.
Manufacturer: Presence Audio, Overdale, Haglands Lane, West Chiltington, Pulborough, West Sussex RH20 2QR, England. Tel: +44 (0)1798 813133. Web: www.londondeccaaudio.com. US distributor: Pro Audio, Ltd., Barrington, IL 60010 (1995). May Audio Marketing, 2150 Liberty Drive, Unit 7, Niagara…
"Marvins Room," the second track on side two of Drake's platinum-selling Take Care (LP, Cash Money/Universal Republic B0016280-01), is a veiled but nonetheless intriguing confession from a sensitive young man whose addictions to alcohol, sex, and fame have prevented him from developing any sort of healthy relationship. I've come to this conclusion after several happy hours of listening to the song from beginning to end, over and over again, while swapping between two very different interconnects: AudioQuest's Sidewinder ($65/1m pair, now discontinued) and Kimber Kable's time-honored PBJ ($110…
I also love the cable's look and feel—holding it in my hands is almost as satisfying as having it in my system. It's thin, light, and flexible, and its three individually colored wires (red, blue, and black) look purple from a distance. That's cool. I was hoping, perhaps fancifully, that there was some artistic motivation behind the color scheme, but Kimber selected the colors for practical reasons: "Because most of our interconnect cables are the same construct in balanced or single-ended [configuration], we needed three colors to speed production. We had been using black and blue in our…
Fred Delius and the Duettes. Sounds like a 1950s vocal group, doesn't it? Let's start with some great new music. SACD fans: Prepare to vote with your wallets again. Frederick Delius (1862–1934) is one of my favorite second-rank composers who wrote first-rate music. Although not that easy to define, Delius's music is usually instantly identifiable as his.
I think that Delius's reputation has suffered because it's tempting to think of him as nothing more than an earnest spinner of dreamy English pastorales. But his music can be more substantial than that. An excellent new disc of Delius's…