Analog Corner

Are you old enough to remember when the wires connecting speakers to even the most expensive and sophisticated electronics were 16-gauge, multistrand lamp cord, and the terminals on speakers and amplifiers were just little screws? Sometimes those screws wouldn't even secure all of the wires' strands, but as long as loose strands from one screw didn't touch loose strands from the other, it was good enough . . . and back against the wall went your bookshelf speakers.

Dr. Feickert Analogue's top-of-the line turntable, the Firebird ($12,500), is a generously sized record player designed to easily accommodate two 12" tonearms. Its three brushless, three-phase DC motors, arranged around the platter in an equilateral triangle, are connected to a proprietary controller in a phase-locked loop (PLL); according to the Firebird's designer, Dr. Christian Feickert, a reference signal from just one of the motors drives all three—thus one motor is the master while the other two are slaves. (Man, today that is politically incorrect, however descriptively accurate.)

Cavitation revolutionized record cleaning more than a decade ago, when Reiner Gläss's Audiodesksysteme introduced its original fully automatic machine. Mr. Gläss's innovative machine, which automatically spun the record in ultrasonically cavitated water, then dried it with fans, at first was plagued with reliability issues, and because it is sealed, it was not easy to repair.

Peter Ledermann's head rose from his Neumann SX-74 cutting lathe. He looked concerned. "The platter stopped turning the other day and I'm not exactly sure why," he said. "It started working again, but you know, these things are old..."

The vinyl revival was bound to produce a backlash. On February 10 2012, Science Friday, a weekly NPR program, ran a segment titled "Why Vinyl Sounds Better than CD, or Not." Both guests said "or Not" without really explaining why. The show made me even more crazy than usual.

Will yet another $150,000 turntable fly in 2012? I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, but if any designer could make a turntable literally fly, it would be the Onedof's designer, Aleks Bakman.

AnalogPlanet.com has gone live. Allan Toussaint should title an album. Elvis Costello should write a song. I'm running the website, and will continue to write this monthly column for Stereophile, as well as equipment reviews (though fewer of the latter).