Turntable Reviews

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Gramophone DreamsPhono Cartridge ReviewsPhono Preamp ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #25: Dr. Feickert, Jelco, Koetsu, My Sonic Lab
Herb Reichert  |  Dec 13, 2018  | 
I needed one black tiddledywink (not provided) to use Dr. Feickert Analogue's three-speed, two-motor, two-armboard Blackbird turntable. The tiddledywink was for covering the Blackbird's painfully bright power-on LED so that it didn't blind me when I cued up a record. The first night, in my dark listening room, this tiny indicator sprayed the wall behind and the ceiling above with more light than a bright-emitting 845 vacuum tube.
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Budget Component ReviewsGramophone DreamsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #3
Herb Reichert  |  Mar 11, 2015  | 
Before I moved to the boat, I lived in a big old firehouse with a shiny brass pole and a red door. The fire engines were gone but it was still a boy-toy pilgrimage site. The first thing one noticed on entering was a red 356 Porsche coupe. Behind it was a black '32 Ford hot rod with a flat-head V8 and triple Strombergs. Behind that was a 1939 Lincoln convertible from some Godfather movie. On the second floor . . .
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Gramophone DreamsPhono Cartridge ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #37: JSikora Initial turntable & Grado Aeon3 phono cartridge
Herb Reichert  |  Jun 02, 2020  | 
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.
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Gramophone DreamsTonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #73: PTP Audio Solid9 Turntable, Sorane SA-1.2 Tonearm
Herb Reichert  |  May 31, 2023  | 
I wish that all who love LP playback as much as I do could hear a Thorens TD 124 or Garrard 301 or EMT 930 in their systems, but those products are subject to the vagaries of supply and demand: They are rare and pricey.—Art Dudley
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Gramophone DreamsPhono Preamp ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #79: a Vintage Lenco L75 turntable & the PrimaLuna EVO 100 phono stage
Herb Reichert  |  Dec 05, 2023  | 
My adoptive mother, Lily Mae, was a retired businesswoman and former fashion model turned stay-at-home mom and artist-painter with famously good taste in everything. She raised me to have good manners, an "active awareness of color and texture," and "an eye for form." She expected me to critique her paintings, her decorating, and her wardrobe, urging me constantly to develop "good taste in everything."

In Lil's world, a perfect day was for me to skip school and go with her clothes shopping at Marshall Field's, where it was my job to sit in a plush chair offering comments about which outfits had the best fabrics and best "complimented her form." She always said "form is bones" and fashion is about "how fabrics hang on people's bones."

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Gramophone DreamsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #8
Herb Reichert  |  Feb 10, 2016  | 
Everyone in the room can hear the difference when I swap one phono cartridge for another. Same thing happens with loudspeakers. This is because both of these magnet-based transducer technologies are electromechanical devices, traditionally made of paper, wood, iron, and copper. (Nowadays, polymers, aluminum, and carbon composites are more typical.) Both are motor-generator mechanisms that either convert mechanical energy into electrical energy (cartridges) or vice versa (speakers). As audio devices, they are spool-and-wire simple, but even tiny changes in the materials and/or how those materials are configured can cause easily audible differences in how they transmit or present recordings of music. Why? Because every gross fragment and subatomic particle of these electromechanical contraptions is moving and shaking—shaking everything from the tiny jumping electrons to the wood, metal, and/or plastic containers that fix and locate these motor generators in space.
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Gramophone DreamsPhono Cartridge ReviewsTonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #9
Herb Reichert  |  Mar 29, 2016  | 
"Hail, Neophyte!"

That's what members of the Smoky Basement Secret Audio Society would exclaim in unison at the end of each ceremony admitting a new devotee. It was called the Smoky Basement Society not because everyone smoked (though they did), but because its members believed that whenever an audio designer finally got a design dialed in just right, he or she had metaphorically "let the smoke out." They exclaimed, "Hail, Neophyte!" because they believed that the most important aspect of being an audio engineer was to have a fully open "beginner's mind." In Zen practice, this is called Shoshin, or beginner's heart.

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Gramophone DreamsTonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams #92: Technics SL-1300G record player
Herb Reichert  |  Jan 01, 2025  | 
Like romance or car racing, the act of playing records is tactile by design. Like drifting through curves or making out, spinning vinyl is a learned skill that requires users to touch everything with practiced assurance.

To play a disc with Technics' new SL-1300G record player means pushing its round On button, then touching one or more of its rectangular speed selector buttons, then pushing the big square [Start:Stop] button, then unclamping the tonearm and using its cue lever to raise it up.

Next comes the part where my heart beats a little faster: using the headshell's fingerlift to position the arm over the disc and lower it into a groove.

When the needle contacts the groove, the whole system kicks in and sound comes out.

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Gramophone DreamsTurntable Reviews
Gramophone Dreams#18: AMG Giro turntable
Herb Reichert  |  Oct 03, 2017  | 
It's get-ting bet-ter all the time (it can't get no worse)—John Lennon & Paul McCartney

Remasterings of recordings make me angry—they mess with my memories of the songs I love, especially songs from the 1960s that I played in my bedroom on a cheap Garrard turntable through Lafayette speakers. Like my first girlfriend, these songs permanently entered my psyche and modified my DNA.

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Turntable Reviews
Grand Prix Audio Monaco direct-drive turntable
Michael Fremer  |  Nov 15, 2007  | 
Conceptually audacious, elegantly designed, executed with space-age precision, and remarkably compact, Grand Prix Audio's direct-drive Monaco turntable ($19,500) aims to turn the tables on the belt-drive designs that have dominated analog playback for three decades.
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Audacious AudioTurntable Reviews
Hanss Acoustics T-30 turntable
Art Dudley  |  Feb 23, 2010  | 
Revolver? More like evolver: 80 years after the first electrically driven record players became available, professional and amateur engineers continue to seek new ways to spin LPs with ever-greater steadiness and precision.
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Tonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
HiFiction Thales TTT-Slim II turntable & Simplicity II tonearm
Art Dudley  |  Aug 01, 2019  | 
Money, that unreliable buyer of happiness, has at times proven effective at delivering good sound. It can buy other things, as well: Audiophiles can swap cash for products that function as objets d'art, as status symbols, or even as canny investments.

But—do you think money can buy peace of mind for the audio enthusiast who frets over binding voice-coils, leaking capacitors, drifting resistor values, oxidizing connectors, aging or incorrectly biased tubes, and that most pernicious worry of all, distortion and premature record wear from incorrectly aligned phono cartridges? Sadly, most of those neuroses, some quite reasonable, remain unaddressed by cash almighty.

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Turntable Reviews
Immedia RPM2 turntable
Wes Phillips  |  Jun 26, 2005  |  First Published: Sep 01, 1997  | 
Okay, what does a turntable look like? Take your time—I'll wait. Dum de dum de dum dum dum... Oh, you're tired of this game already?
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Turntable Reviews
Kuzma Stabi R turntable
Ken Micallef  |  Jun 18, 2019  | 
I've been the proud owner of a Kuzma Stabi S turntable and Stogi S tonearm since 2001. The combination was an impulse purchase, made after seeing and hearing it in action at Stereophile's Home Entertainment Show at the New York Hilton. Even under unruly show conditions, the Kuzma player created rock-solid images and played music with serious jump factor. With its matte brass finish, tubular bell looks, and overtly industrial design, the Slovenian-made Stabi S/Stogi S was steampunk before steampunk. Looking back, it was one of my best-ever audio purchases.
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Tonearm ReviewsTurntable Reviews
Kuzma Stabi turntable & Stogi tonearm
Guy Lemcoe  |  Dec 14, 2017  |  First Published: May 01, 1995  | 
I first learned of the Kuzma Stogi at the 1993 Winter CES in Las Vegas. In VPI's room at the Sahara, a portly, black tonearm was sitting proudly atop the new VPI TNT Series 3 turntable. Pointing straight at me from the center of its massive, exceptionally stout frame was a tapered armtube the diameter of a swollen thumb. The fact that this unknown (to me) tonearm was chosen to sit atop a turntable as respected as the TNT told me I was looking at a serious new product. VPI's Harry Weisfeld was standing nearby, beaming as usual, to answer the barrage of questions that sprang from my lips as I leaned over for a closer inspection. Who? What? Where? When? Why? How much?
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