Stereophile Dec-13

Snob Appeal It began innocently enough. In June, Slate.com published a sampling from an exhibit by the photographer Kai Schaefer, in which classic LPs of different eras were partnered with the similarly classic record players on which they might have been played: Tea for the Tillerman on a Dual 1219, Kind of Blue on a Rek-O-Kut Rondine, Sgt. Pepper’s on a Thorens TD 124—you get the idea. The photos worked as cultural documents, as good-natured kitsch, as surprisingly beautiful and compelling industrial art. I was thoroughly charmed. Schaefer’s own website, www.worldrecords.me, has as its epigraph a quote from the writer Jean Paul: “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.” Resoundingly true—nonetheless, some nitwit on Slate tried her damnedest. In yet the billion-teenth example of the questionable value of…

FEEDBACK TO THE EDITOR The enjoyable middle Editor: I totally enjoyed and agree with Sam Tellig’s praise for Bluetooth in Stereophile (“Sam’s Space,” October 2013). I recently tried to point out to my local audiophile group that it is now possible, by connecting your computer to your audio system, to listen to practically any recording ever made, in perfectly listenable sound, for a very modest subscription fee. But nobody cared. What jerks! I think it must be a matter of age and perspective. I started listening to music on a portable phonograph in my dorm room in 1955, and everything since then has been an amazing improvement. But now most folks are perfectly happy with earbuds, a small group of affluent audiophiles turn up their noses at anything costing less than six figures, and…

AUDIO NEWS & VIEWS UK: GLASGOW AND THE ORKNEY ISLANDS Paul Messenger According to a press release from Linn Products’ recently appointed PR company, 2013 is the year that the Sondek LP12 turntable reaches the illustrious age of 40—a sobering thought that reminds me that I have been in this business nearly as long. To celebrate the occasion, Linn—with some help from Highland Park, an ancient whisky distillery in Scotland’s Orkney Islands—has come up with an Anniversary Limited Edition of the LP12. The link between the companies is that the plinth of this limited edition is made from casks of Spanish oak previously used to store and age Highland Park’s single-malt whiskies. Arguably the best news is that each package comes complete with an attractively presented bottle of 40-year-old Highland Park single-malt that usually…

Go Bluetooth Am I the only one who values content and convenience over sound quality? There. I’ve said it. I am not an audiophile; ie, someone who’s in love with recorded sound for its own sake. The search for ideal sound can leave a person burned out and broke. That might be why I love Internet radio via Bluetooth. So much content. So convenient, via smartphone or laptop. As for computer-audio downloads, they’re too complicated, chaotic, and costly. I might pay for streaming high-resolution audio, if the content and convenience are there. More than one computer guru has said that digital subscriptions are the future. Who wants to “own” and store physical media? I love Musical Fidelity’s M1SDAC with aptX Bluetooth (see “Sam’s Space” in October), even though my iPhone 4, updated to iOS 7,…

A Question of Balance The quest for vinyl quiet seems, at best, quixotic. By “vinyl quiet” I don’t mean “quiet vinyl,” which we now reliably get from pressing plants like QRP, RTI, Pallas, and a few others. I’m referring to makes of phono preamplifiers who set as a primary design goal electronic “quiet,” ie, an absence or minimum of electronic noise. A stylus coursing through the groove of even the quietest LP still produces a considerable amount of noise. If you’ve ever made a digital file from an LP using an analog-to-digital converter equipped with a level meter, you know what I’m talking about. Yet despite what such meters display, practically speaking, to the ears, a clean LP in good condition is quiet when first amplified, even by a multi-tubed phono preamp…

Old Tricks for New Dogs Memory mitigates adversity.—Lucius Lactantius (ca 240–ca 320 AD) Pity the aging perfectionist, the happy diversions of whose younger days—washing records, oiling turntables, leveling equipment racks, cleaning tube pins—have now become hated chores. And this from a man who used to redo his Roksan Xerxes setup every few months, just for “fun.” Sad irony, then, that an interest in mono LPs and shellacs came upon me so late in life, for it is a field in which the experts, among whose number I count God, would have me use different stylus profiles, different tonearm setups, different step-up transformers, and different playback-equalization curves when playing different mono records. I endure in doing the first three, because those things are necessary to both my enjoyment of music and to the preservation…