During the years I lived in New York City and environs, I never learned my way around Brooklyn—something I now regret, given that borough's emergence as a hotbed of audio creativity: our industry's Laurel Canyon, so to speak. Such gone-but-not-forgotten brands as Futterman and Fi were manufactured there, and today Brooklyn is home to DeVore Fidelity, Lamm Industries, Mytek Digital, Grado Labs, Ohm Acoustics, and Oswalds Mill Audio. The list of audio luminaries who call Brooklyn home includes Herb Reichert, John Atkinson, Steve…
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Adam Wexler posing with a chorus line of (mostly) FM tuners.
My most cherished intangibles—love, beauty, glimpses of higher realms—enter my awareness only after I prepare my psyche to receive them. Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination. In like manner, collecting LPs and storing them properly, setting up turntables, aligning cartridges, and cleaning styli are ritual actions that prepare me for the high moments of focused musical pleasure only a black disc can provide.
The black-disc high moments I am about to describe were inspired by…
This Grado/J.Sikora/Parasound combo sounded conspicuously unmechanical, unnervingly dark, superquiet, noticeably dynamic, and unbelievably microdetailed. But it also—strangely—sounded like nothing I'd heard before. For more than a week, I could not decide on the something-right-or-something-wrongness of the Aeon3 + Initial's sound.
I invited friends over to make cartridge comparisons, and they also struggled to define the Aeon's "unusual" sound. To ground my auditions and focus more on the sound of the J.Sikora turntable, I exchanged the Aeon3 for the Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum…
Dick Olsher returned to the Lindsay-Geyer interconnects in August 1991 (Vol.14 No.8):
The Lindsay-Geyer Highly Magnetic Interconnects (Vol.14 No.2) continue to occupy center stage in my reference system. My opinion of the sound of these cables has not changed. They continue to impress me mightily in the areas of textural purity, treble smoothness, and image definition (footnote 1). The purpose of this short note is to relate some further thoughts concerning David Lindsay's cable hypothesis.
Lindsay correctly describes the skin effect in terms of the propagation of two signal…
Letters from August 1991, (Vol.14 No.8)
DO did not exaggerate
Editor: Dick Olsher's February 1991 review of the Lindsay-Geyer magnetic cable interconnect was technically beyond my comprehension. His conclusions about this cable were so dramatically in its favor as to generate disbelief; was this another example of the kind of literary excess not uncommon with Stereophile writers? Yet one could not dismiss a man of his credentials.
My Adcom preamp and amplifier are connected with a very well-known brand of cable. I bought a Lindsay-Geyer interconnect and performed comparisons…
How can two meticulously built, high-technology, high-performance, premium-quality moving-magnet cartridges that measure so well (according to their manufacturer-supplied specs) sound so different?
That was the question I asked myself after auditioning the high-compliance, moving-magnet Audio-Technica AT-ML 150/OCC and Shure V15-VMR phono cartridges in two different settings. Why two? Well, the sound I got from each was so different in the Rega 9 'table—review to appear next month—I figured I'd better give them both another shot someplace else. So I mounted them in a couple of Graham…
Sidebar: Specifications
Description: Moving-magnet cartridge with Vector-Aligned dual magnets, PCOCC "Paratoroidal" Coils, 0.3mm-diameter gold-plated beryllium cantilever, MicroLine stylus, ceramic mounting base. Source resistance: n/a. Source inductance: n/a. Recommended stylus downforce: 1.25gm, ±0.3gm. Channel separation: 31dB at 1kHz; 21dB at 10kHz. Frequency range: 10Hz–30kHz. Output: 4mV RMS (5cm/s, 1kHz). Recommended load: 47k ohms in parallel with 100–200pF. Vertical tracking angle: 20°.
Weight: Not stated
Serial number of unit reviewed: Not noted.
Price: $400 (1999…
The Talisman S represented, ca 1983, the top of Sumiko's moving-coil cartridge line and shared its design philosophy and external appearance with the Talisman A and B, the remaining two cartridges in the Talisman family before the introduction of the Virtuoso line. The three differed only in cantilever material and stylus shape. The A, the least expensive, had an aluminum alloy cantilever and an elliptical diamond stylus. The B, which retailed for $50 less than the S, had a boron tube cantilever at the tip of which was attached a grain-oriented line-contact diamond stylus. (The current…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Low-output moving-coil cartridge. Output: 0.25mV (1kHz–5cm/s). Optimum load impedance: 40–100 ohms. Channel separation: 30dB at 1kHz. Channel balance: 0.5dB at 1kHz. Frequency response: 10Hz–60kHz, +2, –1dB. Tracking ability: 80cm/s at 315Hz. Lateral and vertical dynamic compliance: 15cu. Recommended tracking force: 2gm. Stylus type: line contact. Tip radii: 2×120µmm. Cantilever: Sapphire tube. Cartridge weight: 6.3gm.
Price: $395, with van den Hul stylus (1989); no longer available (2020). Approximate number of US dealers: 400.
US…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
The system I use for audition of components is one which has given me much listening pleasure over the years and has not stressed my rather limited budget. The front end consists of the Systemdek IIX turntable to which is attached a vintage Infinity Black Widow II tonearm. This unit sits on Tiptoes, which, in turn, rest upon a solid birch shelf. The preamplifier is the much admired PS Audio Model 4.5, used in its Straightwire mode with the MM/MC switch set to MC. This configuration gave me more than enough gain to listen at realistic volume levels, even…