Stereophile Dec-17

“Why can’t you stop being an audiophile?” The question took me off-guard. It didn’t come from one of the usual suspects—a hostile anti-audiophile, or a non-audiophile who simply can’t fathom why we should care so much about something as nonessential as sound reproduction—but from Louis, a sharp dressed, goateed, middle-aged man who was known, among his audio repair shop’s clientele, for not only his virtuosity as a classical solo violinist, but his expertise—some would say his preternatural ability—in setting up turntables to sound their very best. Which explains why, on the day he asked me the question, Louis was in possession of my Rega Research Planar 5 turntable. An hour earlier I’d brought it to his shop, where he had partially dismantled and laid it out on his worktable. He…

What if digital had never happened? Editor: Regarding Steve Guttenberg’s “What If Digital Had Never Happened?” (“As We See It,” October 2017): Thank goodness for digital! I believe that, as a result of digital, the designing of turntables, cartridges, step-up transformers, phono preamps, etc., is now far better than ever—not to mention the manufacture of vinyl. Let’s be honest: Just prior to digital hitting the mass market, most LP manufacturers had become complacent, quality control had become nonexistent, and, as a result, a lot of the vinyl pressed from that era, especially in the US, sounded like crap. Turntable and cartridge design for the most part had stagnated. Who used outboard phono preamps back then? No wonder listeners salivated over digital. Digital raised the ante, begged for competition, and got…

DENMARK: AARS Paul Messenger I mentioned in an April 2017 report that cast iron makes an exceptional loudspeaker enclosure material because of its very effective self-damping due to a high content of carbon in graphite form, its only real disadvantage being its high density and, thus, mass. Jern APS (http://audioform.dk; “jern” is Danish for “iron”) now makes five versions of its original Jern14 loudspeaker, four of them designed to be used with REL T/5i subwoofers, and the company’s number of related components continues to grow. The latest example, the w8000, is actually a quite slim, on-wall, two-way speaker. It’s also entirely circular—partly, perhaps, because such a shape is very difficult to execute in wood! There’s also a cast-iron tweeter waveguide that’s aimed at the DIY market, adding a useful combination…

ATTENTION ALL AUDIO SOCIETIES: We have a page on the Stereophile website dedicated solely to you: www.stereophile.com/audiophile-societies. If you’d like to have your audio-society information posted on the site, e-mail Chris Vogel at info@XLinkAudio.com. Please note that it is inappropriate for a retailer to promote a new product line in “Calendar” unless this is associated with a seminar or similar event. CALIFORNIA ❚ Saturday, November 18, 1–5pm: The Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society will hold its monthly meeting at Sunny’s Audio Video (1370 E. CypressStreet, Suite D, Covina 91724). Sunil Merchant and his crew will demonstrate top-of-the-line equipment designed to maximize your musical enjoyment. This meeting will feature Naim Audio’s Statement series with Wilson Audio Specialties’ Alexandria XLF speakers, and will introduce Naim’s Uniti series. In addition, Wilson’s…

Brooklyn-based Grado Labs has been in business for 64 years, manufacturing moving-iron phono cartridges, headphones, and, for a while, even a unipivot tonearm with a wooden armwand, as well as the sophisticated, S-shaped Signature Laboratory Standard arm. The company’s founder, Joseph Grado, who well deserves the appellation “legendary,” died in 2015, at the age of 90. He began as a watch builder at Tiffany & Company, and started making phono cartridges in 1953, as the hi-fi boom took off. He retired in 1990 and sold Grado Labs—still located in the same Brooklyn building where he’d begun in 1953—to his nephew John Grado Jr., who by then had put in more than a decade at Uncle Joe’s company, pretty much running it after Joe had returned to what he liked best:…

Everything you know is wrong. —The Firesign Theatre The Swissonor TA10, a contemporary tonearm designed for the Thorens TD 124 turntable (1959–1970), challenged me to set aside some of the things I thought I knew about phonography. On at least one of those counts, it succeeded. Handmade in Switzerland and modeled on the Thorens TP 14 tonearm of the 1960s, the TA10 ($3990) improves on its predecessor with an effective length of 240mm, which Swissonor says is the longest that can be achieved with a stock TD 124 armboard (the TP 14’s effective length was only 210mm), and replaces the non-universal plug and socket of the TP 14’s removable headshell with the more common SME standard found on most contemporary headshells, pickup heads, and tonearms. The TA10 also replaces the…