Perfectionist’s choice. - NOVO Magazinecanadahifi.com/digital_edition/CHF56de/apr-may-2015.pdf ·...

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Perfectionist’s choice.

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In Part #1 of this article, I’m going to review a few of the landmark albums released in the late 1960s which, today, are considered to be the cornerstones of harder rock mu-sic and metal. I’ll discuss the bands, their songs, and the recording quality of the most exciting discs from different bands which are now thought of as the founders of modern hard rock. I’ll focus on albums which can be easily purchased in specific formats and/or downloaded from Canadian retail outlets. The goal here is to provide some direction as to which albums to buy; thus saving CANADA HiFi’s read-ers time, effort, and money in the ongoing search for interesting mu-sic which you may not have heard of.

Jimi HendrixLegendary rock bassist Lemmy Kilmister played bass in Hawk-wind and, to this very day at 70 years of age, is the founder and driving force behind Motörhead. In the late 1960s, Lemmy worked as a roadie for The Jimi Hendrix Ex-perience. When asked about Jimi Hendrix, Lemmy once commented:

“There’ll never be another guitar player like him; not in my lifetime.” Fast approaching 45 years since Hendrix’s tragic death, no guitar-ist with his on-stage live perfor-mance energy, dramatic flair, and jaw-dropping virtuosity has yet to emerge. A few have come close, but no one has yet taken rock guitar style, technique, and musicianship further than Jimi Hendrix once did. Much like any number of rock

bands from the late 1960s, if you’ve just discovered Jimi Hendrix, there are an overwhelming number of CDs, vinyl records, and digital downloads available from retailers. When I was in University in the late 1990s, I played rhythm guitar in a garage rock band. Through a

‘tape traders’ network of like-mind-ed musicians who snail-mailed each other cassette tapes, our lead guitar-ist had amassed a collection of 150+ bootleg recordings of Hendrix’s live performances. I can only imag-ine how much of Hendrix’s live gui-tar work from the late 1960s is now available in digital formats over the internet. I’m going to recommend two albums from Hendrix’s career as starting points into discovering his musical legacy.

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The Origins of Harder Rock - Part 1Suggested Albums From Jimi Hendrix, The Who and The MC5

Douglas Brown

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The first is the album Kiss the Sky [Polydor 823704-2]. This compilation album contains 11 tracks and features many of The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s greatest hits, including: Are you Experi-enced?; Voodoo Child (slight re-turn); Castles Made of Sand; Pur-ple Haze; Third Stone from the Sun; and a cover version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. Featuring Noel Redding on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums, and Jimi on vocals and lead / rhythm gui-

tar, Kiss the Sky offers an excellent cross-section of some of the better known songs released by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. By rock music standards, the sound quality of all of the tracks on Kiss the Sky is superlative. Record-ing engineer Eddie Kramer did a he-ro’s job of layering the guitars, bass, drums, and backing vocals into an audiophile level soundstage on the studio recordings. After leaving The Experience in the autumn of 1969, the first album

Hendrix released was a live one recorded on Dec 31st, 1969 and Jan 1st, 1970 at The Fillmore East in New York City. Band of Gypsys [Polydor 847 237-2] features Buddy Miles on drums, Billy Cox on bass, and Jimi on guitars and vocals. For those interested in watching this per-formance on video, Blu-ray and DVD ver-sions of this concert

both exist and can be found easily on-line. Band of Gypsys represents Jimi Hendrix at a transitional phase in his career as a musician. His guitar playing on both nights was phe-nomenal. In particular, the track

‘Machine Gun’ somehow manages to express, and at the same time capture, the oscillating feelings of frustration, anger, despair, sadness, and melancholy which were so tightly wound around the political turmoil of the late 1960s. Clocking in at 12 minutes and 30 seconds, the song ‘Machine Gun’ is something like a war movie, with-out the war movie visuals. As the song progresses, the sound of Hen-drix’s guitar takes listeners on a musical journey through the chaos of war: the humanism, the barba-rism, the insanity, the drama, the violence, the eeriness, and even the unpredictability of war are all viv-idly painted with deft guitar phras-ing, soloing, and imaginative tonal effects. It is truly an epic track. What separates the music on Band of Gypsys from live shows performed previously by The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the impro-visational style and feel of all of the songs. And while I could rec-ommend that anyone interested in Jimi Hendrix’s music just buy ev-erything he ever released, these two choices should give audio enthusi-asts a taste of how far Hendrix had progressed as a guitar player, song writer, and a musician in only 4 or 5 years since he first burst onto the music scene.

The WhoAs 2015 arrives, The Who have offi-cially released 11 studio albums, 12 live albums, 26 compilations, and nearly 60 singles. On top of this, thousands—literally… thousands—of bootleg recordings of their live shows also exist. For anyone new to The Who’s music, the first ques-tion is an obvious one: where does someone interested in The Who’s music even begin? In the late 1960s, seeing The Who

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live was like spotting a UFO: you knew that you’d just witnessed something not-of-this-earth, but it was tough to describe. And, after the event, the sonic experience became even harder to explain. The ‘life altering’ effects of witnessing a live Who show was something you’d remember ‘til the day you died. And something you’d (one day) try to tell your grandchildren about. Recorded at Leeds University on Feb 14th, 1970, the original 6 song vinyl re-lease of The Who’s Live at Leeds [MCA BD-31196] is a cornerstone in the history of harder rock albums. A double-disc ver-sion of the entire show was also released in 1995 [MCA MD-11215]. So fans wish-ing to hear the concert in its entirety can readily do so. As good as the songs on their studio al-bums truly are, in the late 1960s, the vol-canic energy which The Who unleashed live on stage was never quite captured within the studio environment. On the same day that Live at Leeds was recorded, The Who were interviewed by Chris Smith of the Union News; the Leeds University student newspaper. Guitarist Pete Townsend was quoted as saying: “Our act depends a lot on ath-leticism; it demands high volume. Even if the group ever gets quieter, we will always want voices loud- sounding huge and ex-citing. I don’t know how long it can go on. Now we are all so exhausted physically and mentally that we don’t feel the need for destruction anymore.” And drummer Keith Moon commented:

“We don’t make particularly good records.

We have good ideas[,] but not al-ways a good sound. We are dif-ficult to record because we don’t work any different in the studio compared to on stage. Drumsticks are in the air when they should be on the drums[,] and arms are fly-ing when they should be on guitar. In the studio, you should be ses-sion musicians[;] but we are not experienced enough at getting the dynamic sound on record without leaping about. We record clumsily and as loud as possible, so you just hear a long, drawn out row; which is old fashioned. It’s much the same on stage.” The common themes in both of

these comments are of chaos, power, and honesty. In the late 1960s, The Who were as genuine as could be. At that time, they were still young enough, and energetic enough, to play with a ferocious intensity. When Live at Leeds was recorded over 45 years ago in early 1970, there was abso-lutely nothing fake, phoney, or pretentious about The Who or their music. They were the real deal. The Who played at ear-splitting volume levels, with a manic equipment destroying fervour, a resolute honesty, and a swirling on-stage chaos that only one or two bands throughout the entire history of hard rock ever managed to achieve; let alone record on tape. And yet, The Who were more than just angry young lads standing at the centre of a prison-riot’s release of menacing, on-stage chaos. Through years of touring, they’d collectively developed a musical synergy which, on a good night, could take their songs and their audiences to a place of spiritual ecstasy. The four members had a deft sense of being able to play off of one another. They could wander away from the core of a song and go exploring ‘off-piste’ into deeper and rougher out-of-bounds musi-cal terrain with ease. And, unlike most bands, The Who’s members had the musi-cianship to bring the entire musical flying circus right back on track. Roger Daltry’s vocals are confident and resolute in his conviction to not just sing the lyrics, but enunciate them with pride; and power. I’ve yet to see or hear a live Who show where Keith Moon ever

played behind the beat. On Live at Leeds, Moon hammers away with an exhausting force and intensity. Bassist John Entwis-tle keeps the rhythm section tight, but also adds imaginative runs and powerful chords to cement the lower octaves with a solid foundation. And Pete Townsend plays his manic guitar solos and rock-of-Gibraltar chords like a man possessed. The magical musical synergy which these four virtuoso musicians had togeth-er sends shivers up a listener’s spine. The breath-taking ‘Bedlam on a pogo-stick’ near chaos that usually occurred during The Who’s live shows is captured with ex-cellent sonics on Live at Leeds. Combined with their sublime musical performances, this album is a superb place to start for anyone interested in exploring the musi-cal heritage of The Who.

The MC5Espousing a radical, counter-cultural, anti-everything political agenda, The Mo-tor City Five (MC5 for short) were an American band formed in Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1964. Intent on unleashing a sonic tsunami of social upheaval, political revolution, and a concurrent wave of mu-sical destruction, the MC5 represented the anti-establishment movement at its most volatile; and threatening. On a good night, the MC5 could trump the ferocious on-stage energy and musical synergy of The Who. While they didn’t have the technical skills of Jimi Hendrix and the musicians he played with, the MC5 had attitude; in spades. The MC5’s music contains elements of garage rock, hard rock, blues rock, and psychedelic rock which many have cred-ited as being the foundation for the entire punk movement of the 1970s. Packed to the brim with volatile explo-sives and deliberately set on fire for the ugly fun of seeing what might happen, live in concert, the MC5 played with the unstoppable force of a runaway freight-train, fast rolling at 90 MpH towards a cat-astrophic derailment. How the individual members of this band managed to keep in time with one another while unleashing so much anger, energy, and adrenalin is be-yond me. To their credit, on the live album Kick Out the Jams [Elektra CD 60894], the MC5 kept the train rolling right along and

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delivered one of the most stagger-ing live rock’n’roll albums ever re-leased. Much in the same way that The Who readily acknowledged that, in the 1960s, their studio albums lacked the energy and synergy of their live shows, this is the MC5’s best album. Recorded on October 30th and October 31st, 1968 at Russ Gibb’s Grande Ballroom in Detroit, Michi-gan, Kick Out the Jams showcases the musical genius of vocalist Rob Tyner, lead guitarist Wayne Kramer, rhythm guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, bassist Michael Davis, and drum-mer Dennis Thompson. Kick Out the Jams delivers an adrenalin-laced, ultra high energy set of 8 songs played with a fierce, tongue-in-cheek, rebellious attitude. The first 5 tracks on the album hit with all the subtlety of an air-to-ground missile slamming into the side of an unsuspecting passenger jet. The songs Ramblin’ Rose, Kick Out the Jams, Come Together, Rock-et Reducer No. 62, and Borderline are well worth the sticker price for this album alone.

The last 3 songs are slower and have a blues inspired feel to them. The tracks Motor City is Burning, I Want You Right Now, and Starship all display the MC5’s willingness to experiment with a shotgun mixture of odd time signatures, 12-bar blues riffs, and psychedelic drugs like LSD and marijuana. If you’re looking for some relax-ing music to soothe your jangled nerves, look elsewhere. Re-re-leased in 1991 with all of the MC5’s brash, vainglorious, and unrepentant rage intact, Kick Out the Jams is not an album for delicate ears. Be forewarned… the expletive-laced ban-ter between songs is rude, crude, and as real as real can be; and is readily avail-able on both CD and heavy-weight vinyl formats. Bottom line, if this album doesn’t raise your blood-pressure, spike your heart rate,

and have you turning the volume up WAY too loud with a twisted smile on your face, call a coroner, ‘cause you may already be dead. This is an album that simply refuses to be played quietly. In Part #2 of this Feature Article on ‘The Origins of Harder Rock’, I’ll suggest albums for CANADA HiFi’s readers which were released in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Cream.


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There is no doubt that there are few hobbies on earth that generate more spirited debates, discussions and arguments, as the field of high-end audio. One of the primary reasons for this is that as human beings we all hear differently and so what sounds good to one listener, may not float the boat of another and so when one tries to express what he or she hears, that creates a very fertile ground for an altercation! One of the more popular top-ics trending in the world of audio is whether the human ear can tell the difference between Red Book (16/44.1 CD quality) resolution and the higher resolutions that are now available. There is a fair amount of consensus that if there is an audible

difference you need exceptionally high quality gear to hear this differ-ence and if someone cannot hear the difference, there is a good chance that it may be because the sonic per-formance of their equipment does not reach the fidelity levels that re-veal the difference. My more hon-est audio enthusiast friends have ad-mitted to me that, even though they have very high-end components, they still cannot hear any difference. Many of them console themselves with the rationale that it removes the craving to invest in higher reso-lution versions of music tracks that they already have in the Red Book resolution. To try and resolve this raging de-bate, I decided to approach the sub-ject from a different angle. Rather than focusing on the audio perfor-

mance perspective, I reasoned that it could be better served to tackle it from the human hearing ability angle. This then, is my take that is based on my 35 years of reviewing high-end audio gear and for what it’s worth, my ears of experience. If you had the opportunity to watch the mid 1960s movie “Fan-tastic Voyage” you will know that it is a sci-fi tale of humans being shrunk to a size that enables them to explore the inside of a human body. So come join me, if you will, on a similar voyage of the inside of the human ear. The human ear is amongst the most sophisticated listening devic-es on earth and is truly one of the greatest marvels of Mother Nature. The part of the ear that is respon-sible for intercepting and collecting

Malcolm Gomes


Ears of ExperienceHow does our hearing relate to music?

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information on the nature of the sound vibrations that reach the ear are very fine, extremely delicate and incredibly sensitive hair cells that sit on what is called the basi-lar membrane in the cochlea. Each of these hair cells is fine tuned to a specific frequency band. The hairs in the middle are more sensitive than their counterparts on either side. The membrane on which the hairs are attached is tuned so that it resonates at different frequencies along its length. The base of the membrane is tuned to the higher frequencies while the apex detects the lower ones. It is general knowledge that as human beings, we can hear sounds that go from 20Hz to 20,000Hz (or 20 kHz). Have you ever wondered how these figures were arrived at? The first step in the methodol-ogy used was to employ precision

calibrated playback equipment, pre-cisely tailored anechoic surround-ings and rigorous statistical analysis to measure the absolute threshold of human hearing across the entire audible frequency spectrum. This provided a curve that represented the quietest sound that we can hear for each of the frequencies in the audible spectrum. Just like our sense of sight, taste and smell, our auditory senses also suffer from fatigue and lack of con-centration after being used continu-ously for a relatively long period of time. To transcend this, the tests were conducted with numerous breaks and pauses over many days to ensure the most accurate result possible. Next, measurements were con-ducted to find the other end of the spectrum, which is the threshold of pain. This is the level at which the

sound pressure level is so high, it actually gives the listener a sensa-tion of physical pain. Here again, the threshold of pain changed with different frequencies. The tests in-dicated that our ears are able to tolerate a higher SPL at lower fre-quencies than it can with the mid-range frequencies. These tests had to be done using extreme caution so as not to permanently damage the hearing of the test subjects. One of the earliest tests of this nature were conducted in 1933 by Fletcher and Munson. The results of those tests were quite accurate but subsequent tests done using more technically advanced equip-ment revealed that the human ear is quite a bit less sensitive to lower frequencies than what the Fletcher and Munson findings stated. This culminated in the Phon scale and the ISO 226 standard equal loud-

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ness curves. To use a loudspeaker analogy, the co-chlea operates like a bass reflex speaker cabinet at low frequencies with an open-ing at the apex of the membrane called the helicotrema acting like a port that is tuned to the 40Hz to 65Hz range. This varies from one person to another. Below 40Hz, the response rolls off very steeply, which is why many of us can feel rather than hear frequencies in the bottom octave. Measuring the frequencies that we can hear is just part of the story as it relates to the world of high-end audio. Another equally important chapter in this story is the human ear’s dynamic range capabil-ity, or the soft to loud range of sound that ears can detect. One of the biggest differ-ences between live music and recorded/reproduced music is the dynamic range. Although great strides have been made in this regard over the past few decades, there is still a perceivable difference in the dynamic range that we experience at a live performance vis-à-vis the same music that is reproduced by our audio system. In a healthy youngster with normal hear-ing, the difference between the softest sound that he or she can perceive and the loudest sound that they can tolerate with-out experiencing pain is around 135 deci-bels at best. However, given that sound pressure levels of 130 decibels for even a minute may be loud enough to dam-age one’s hearing permanently, in the real world, practical dynamic range of the hu-man ear is significantly below 140 deci-bels. To give you an idea of the loudness that we are talking about here, consider that a jackhammer operating at a distance of 1 meter from the human ear can reach a level of around 110 decibels. The threshold of pain rises as we get older and as we start loosing some of our hear-ing ability. This is because the hair cells of the cochlea account for only a part of the theoretical 135-decibel dynamic range of our ears. The musculature in the ear has the ability to constantly vary the amount of sound reaching the cochlea. It achieves this by adjusting the ossicles not unlike the way the iris determines the amount of light entering our eye. As we get older the ossicles get increasingly stiffer which hampers their ability to act as a protection mechanism and results in reducing the dy-namic range ability of our ear.

In many reviews of high-end audio gear, you come across the phrase “silence be-tween the notes”. The fact of the matter is that most of us have no idea of what total silence really is. When we are relax-ing atop a mountain, far from the madding crowd we think that we are experiencing total silence, but that is hardly the case. If you really perk up your ears, you will hear things like the sound of the wind and the rustling of leaves. If you really would really like to experi-ence total silence, try to spend a minute in an anechoic chamber. I learnt this the hard way. In 1989, I was invited to spend a few days as the guest of Dr. Amar Bose in America. During that visit he gave me a tour of this facility in Framingham, Mas-sachusetts and he let me spend a few min-utes in his anechoic chamber. The only way to describe it is to say that the silence was truly deafening. He explained to me that from the time our auditory facilities get fully developed in the womb, we are subjected to some form of sound and so our brain accepts this as the norm. This is why, when our brain is suddenly con-fronted with total silence, it is a form of sensory deprivation, which our brain finds unnatural, and this can drive us bonkers. Apparently, the people who work in an-echoic chambers testing speakers, have to acclimatize their brains by first spending just a couple of minutes in this environ-ment and then gradually increasing this duration until their brain can reconcile to a relatively longer time in total silence. For most people the quietest sound that they can perceive is around a 9-decibel sound pressure level. To help you grasp this notion, a 100-watt incandescent light bulb that is placed one meter away from your ears will generate a sound pressure level of around 18 decibels. If you have ever visited a professional recording stu-dio and marvelled at how quiet it was in the room where the musicians perform, know that this ‘silence’ usually has a sound pressure level of around 27 deci-bels. If the room where you do most of your music listening at home can attain a decibel level of even 35 decibels, you should consider yourself lucky because the typical listening room in a quiet neigh-bourhood is closer to the 45-decibel mark. My purpose built auditioning room is around 90% underground and has exten-

sive room treatments, which allows me to enjoy a decibel level of around 27 to 34 decibels. Given all this information, can we then surmise that some people have better hearing than others and a lucky few are blessed with golden ears? Well, the jury is still out on that one, because there are numerous definitions and there is no gen-eral agreement on how one could describe golden ears. There is fairly universal agreement that a young healthy person will generally have better hearing than a much older person. It is also generally accepted that we can

‘train’ our ears to listen for and hear nu-ances and subtleties in sound in general, and music in particular. What we can deduce from this is that someone with healthy ears who has un-dergone training to heighten their ability to detect and discriminate even the tiniest nuances and subtleties in complex musi-cal passages will notice and isolate details that may escape the untrained ear. What makes this subject truly fascinat-ing is, there is good anecdotal evidence that the human ear can benefit from the right training even if our auditory system is not up to scratch. What this means is that, unless you are an octogenarian or older, you can, with training, gain the abil-ity to notice details that could escape ears that have not benefited from this training. Perhaps this could be why, despite the fact that most people experience diminished auditory abilities after the age of 50, many of the world’s leading high-end audio re-viewers are in their fifties and sixties. This is also welcome news for baby boomers that aspire to golden ears. Having good audio equipment and good listening room acoustics is of paramount importance in this hobby, but perhaps, the best advice I can give budding and estab-lished music listeners is to devote as much time as you can, training your ears to de-tect the minute subtleties and nuances in your favourite music. If you could learn to play a musical instrument, that will also help big time. These measures will pay huge dividends in the amount of plea-sure and enjoyment that you derive from listening to your favourite tunes…..and when all is said and done, isn’t that what the audio hobby is all about?


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Thinking of upgrading your pre/pro or receiver? Consider waiting a little longer. Not too long ago, Dolby’s Atmos object oriented surround sound codec hit the con-sumer electronics market. Traditional sur-round sound mixing required engineers to work at the level of individual channels. Fading out from the left speaker while fad-ing into the center channel and repeating the process from the center to left channel gives the impression of an object moving across the screen. This level of detailed channel to channel work is tedious and it’s difficult to get it right. Atmos is different because it allows con-tent providers to mix their soundtracks by moving virtual objects in three dimension-al space. An airplane for example, can be moved through space by simply showing the computer the aircraft’s flight path. The lower level logic in the Atmos system then takes care of figuring out how to distribute the sound across all the speakers. No need to fade sounds in and out of individual channels anymore. In addition to this new way of doing things, Atmos also adds the dimension of height to the mix. The object

oriented concept is a very powerful one and promises considerable improvements in a surround system’s ability to precisely locate sounds in space, even above you! The location of objects in space is in-dependent of speaker configuration so once Atmos knows how you’ve placed your speakers, it will do the best it can to accurately represent these objects in your environment. Atmos is capable of many speaker configurations one of which is 7.2.4. This configuration involves the conventional 7.2 we are familiar with but adds four height speakers. These four height channels will of course provide the extra height dimension. Atmos sounds pretty great right? So why in the world should I wait? Competition is why. Dolby isn’t the only player in this new arena. A competitor, Auro-3D, is al-ready available in certain products as a firmware upgrade. However, Auro-3D’s speaker configuration is different than Dolby’s. Auro uses a Voice of God (VOG) channel directly overhead rather than on each side of the listener. This potentially leads to difficulties in configuring speak-ers. But the real reason to wait is the other major player in the digital surround world

and that’s of course DTS. By the time you read this, DTS will have announced the details of DTS:X. The rea-son to wait should be getting pretty clear right about now. For the moment, we know very little about DTS:X but one thing we do know is that none of the At-mos pre/pros or receivers available today have it. Will it be available as a firmware update? Maybe. Maybe not. Many major manufactures will be supporting DST:X which is great but doesn’t help us right now. Furthermore, we don’t even know which speaker configurations DTS:X will support. Will they be the same as Atmos or Auro-3D? Or maybe they will be some-thing completely different. Does DTS matter? You bet it does. DTS is indeed a major player in this game. De-spite the fact that the Dolby Digital was first on the market, DTS managed to over-take Dolby. Today more Blu-rays have DTS-HD than Dolby TrueHD. There’s no guarantee that DST can do it again but it would be foolish to write them off. Given that we shouldn’t have much longer to wait, I for one, would strongly argue that waiting at least until the official DST:X announcement would be very wise indeed.


Frank Labonte

Is it Time for a New Pre/Pro or AV Receiver?Consider Waiting a Little... DTS:X Is Coming Soon

Today’s televisions are leaps and bounds beyond what the first cathode ray tube sets were, containing everything from quad-core processors to gyroscope-equipped re-motes with voice-recognition capabilities. The pursuit for the highest picture qual-ity to rival that of movie theatres is ever present, with the latest OLED technology finally able to provide an absolute black level – the holy grail of picture reproduc-tion. In previous years, manufacturers have inundated retail store shelves with a pleth-

ora of models and sizes, to provide every possible option for the bedroom, kitchen, rec room, and anywhere else where a con-sumer might sit down to catch up on the latest offerings on Netflix. This overload has rightly confused consumers trying to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Un-like buying a car, where there are distinct categories such as compacts, full-size, SUVs, and so forth, a consumer buying a TV was met with a myriad of model numbers, each with their varying levels of performance and quality. Fortunately,

manufacturers have (mostly) seen the er-ror of their ways and have (somewhat) consolidated their offerings into more manageable tiers. LG has 6 tiers from the 4000 to the 9000 models; Panasonic has 5 tiers from the

“4xx” to the “9xx” models; Samsung now has seven tiers from the “3” series through to the “9” series; Sony’s 4 tiers are the

“R”, “W”, “W Premium”, and “XBR”; and lastly, VIZIO, who finally entered the Canadian market back in October, has the

“E”, “M”, “P” and yet-to-be-released “Ref-


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POWER YOU WANTIt’s not how much power you need, it’s how much

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erence” series. At their core, televisions are about re-producing the best possible image and starting off by looking at the various display technologies offered, OLED (or-ganic light-emitting diode) TV sets offer arguably the best picture quality. This is due to the way they produce the im-age: without a backlight. As OLEDs are self-illuminating, they dispense with the need for a backlight allowing each pixel to produce its single colour or completely shut off, offering what is effectively an infinite contrast level (0% to 100%). The OLED pixel also turns on and off practi-cally instantly, without any slow fading or ghosting. Hence, OLED sets no longer ad-vertise refresh rates (whereas other manu-facturers cite 120 Hz, 240 Hz, or higher). The downside to the technology, like any leading edge technology, is the price. Currently, only LG produces OLED sets thanks to their head start in research and manufacturing. Other manufacturers such as Samsung and Sony have cited high cost, low yields, and issues with uniform colour reproduction (blue has the shortest wave-length, requiring OLED pixels that are larger than red or green) as reasons why they don’t yet offer sets based on the tech-nology. At CES 2015, LG announced that moving forward, they will concentrate OLED production on 4K and subsequent-

ly, will only be releasing 4K OLED sets. (They continue to sell an existing 1080p OLED set but will no longer release new 1080p OLED models.) LG’s top-tier 4K OLED sets are their 8800 and 9x00 series and come in 65” (flat) and 55” (flat and curved) sizes. With OLEDs relegated to a single manu-facturer, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and VIZIO have to make due with LCD tech-nology but even here, the image-making process continues to improve and picture quality is still exceptional. Almost all LCD TVs now use a more precise LED backlight instead of the older CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) backlight. This allows the TVs to be brighter (and darker) and subsequently produce a better image (while being thinner, using less power, and other non-picture advantages). With the advent of smaller, more precise LED backlights, there are two categories of how this is applied: local dimming and edge-lit with the former producing better picture quality and the latter being less expensive. Locally-dimmed backlights divide the TV into zones and are able to individually control the backlight in each zone to pro-duce darker or brighter images, as needed. This in turn allows dark areas of the im-age to stay dark while bright areas of the same image to be bright. Higher tier sets will have more zones, allowing for more

precise backlighting. LG’s “7x000” series and above; Panasonic’s “800” series (32 zones) and “900” series (128 zones); Sam-sung’s “6” series and above; Sony’s “W Premium” and “XBR”; and all of VIZIO’s three series offer local-dimming LED backlights of various quantities. Of note, VIZIO offers local-dimming throughout their entire series, including their budget-minded “E” series which has 16 zones. Their “E”, “M”, “P” and “Reference” se-ries have 18, 36, up to 72 (depending on size), and 384 (!) dimming zones, respec-tively. Full-array local dimming produces a better image with only one downside: requiring a thicker TV cabinet to accom-modate the backlighting components. Lower-tier TVs will use edge-lit back-lights which mount the LEDs on the edges: either the top/bottom, left/right, or all four sides. These sets are thinner than their locally-dimmed cousins and cheaper, but produce a slightly lower-quality im-age due to the inability to produce darker blacks. Furthering enhancing the backlight is a new component called “quantum dots” which are microscopic beads that have the unique capability of emitting very precise colours (wavelengths of light). A tradition-al backlight emits white light which then passes through filters which filter out and light up the individual red, green, and blue

pixels on a screen. As white light is made up of component colours like the rainbow, fil-tering out the required RGB wavelengths in-troduces inefficiencies and impurities, lead-ing to less precise and subsequently less vivid colour reproduction. The backlight of quan-tum dot-equipped TVs is blue, which directly illuminates the blue pixels. Green- and red-emitting quantum dots, in turn, are used to emit narrow, precise wave-lengths of green and red light when activated by the blue backlight (blue light has the highest en-

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ergy level and when it hits the quantum dots, falls down to the lower green and red levels meaning additional energy does not have to be put into the system). This allows for less filtering and better colour reproduction. Quantum dots have the ad-vantage of being able to be readily incor-porated into existing LCD manufacturing processes and as such are an easier (and more economical) way to extend and en-hance LCD picture quality (versus retool-ing for a new technology such as OLED). Quantum dots-equipped sets start at LG’s 9400, Samsung’s 9500 and Sony’s “W Se-ries Premium” TVs. Going alongside the ability to produce the image is the ability to accurately re-produce motion because after all, televi-sion is just moving pictures. Here is where refresh rates come into play. While broad-cast/cable television is filmed at 30 frames per second and Blu-rays are rendered at 24 frames per second, refresh rates, mea-sured in hertz (Hz) or a unit of “times per second”, are available in 60, 120, and 240. As LCD pixels have to be illuminated by a

backlight, the pixels inevitably fade if not sustained or relit. This is where the refresh rate comes in: the television repaints each individual frame 60, 120, 240 or more times per second to ensure each pixel is at its intended brightness. Higher refresh rates mean that the television is capable of painting the image quicker and sub-sequent frames erase the previous frame with a minimal of overlap, eliminating motion blur or image artefacts. The televi-sion interpolates and replicates the frames to fill in the requisite number of images and that’s why numbers such as 120 Hz (which both 30 and 24 multiple into evenly) were chosen so that there would be no “half” or partial frames. To refresh a 24 fps source to 120 Hz, each frame is refreshed 5 times; for a 30 fps source, each frame is refreshed 4 times. By ana-lyzing subsequent “real” frames, the TV’s image processor will calculate the differ-ences between the actual recorded frames and create (interpolate) frames that lead from one real frame to the subsequent real frame. This helps to eliminate mo-

tion artefacts and is especially beneficial for fast-moving content such as sports. However, this artificial smoothness can be very unnatural when applied close-up to human beings as our eyes are attuned to seeing blurred images when something moves too quickly. This unintended “soap opera” effect is one reason to turn off the motion-enhancement functionalities when viewing content focused (close-up) on people. Nowadays, only the most budget sets utilize a 60 Hz refresh rate while all mainstream sets are 120 Hz and above. The other component of picture quality, beyond colour and refresh rate is the reso-lution. The majority of television sets are still 1080p (1,920x1,080) but a growing percentage have moved to UltraHD/4K (3,840x2,160), offering 4 times the total pixels (2,073,600 vs. 8,294,400). While the visual difference between 1080p and 4K isn’t as dramatic as the evolution from standard definition (480p) to 1080p, as many will attest to, once you’ve seen the visual clarity of a 4K television set, going back to 1080p is almost painful. Despite


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the widespread availability of native 4K content, all 4K televisions are equipped with upscaling image processors and up-scaled non-4K content on a 4K television still looks better than on an equivalently sized 1080p set. As with all technologies, the price premium is quickly shrinking and sales figures show that 4K is being ad-opted at a faster rate than 1080p sets were. The premium between VIZIO’s 70” M-Se-ries and their 70” 4K P-Series is only 28% ($640) at the time of writing. As the ma-jority of 4K content is streamed, 4K sets are equipped with the new HEVC (H.265) codec, which offers better compression for the larger bitrates and bandwidth re-quired for 4K content. This is possible due to faster processors now available. For hardwired content, HDMI has also been upgraded to v2.0, supporting 4K at 60 fps. Moving beyond the television’s core functionality, new TVs are coming equipped with “smart” features that allow consumers to watch streaming content from a variety of sources (such as Netf-lix, YouTube, and others), play media

from any connected device in their net-work (such as a network-attached storage device, a smartphone or tablet, or a com-puter) and use the display for more than just watching TV. The concept of an “app” is no longer confined to a smartphone and TVs themselves have app stores that allow consumers to install additional functional-ity such as Skype, Facebook, or even si-multaneously video-chat while watching content, picture-in-picture style (great for live events such as sports). The software that these TVs run has also been upgraded, with LG recently releasing WebOS v2.0, Sony and Sharp adopting Android TV, Panasonic using Firefox OS, and Sam-sung running its “Smart Hub”. Samsung also has a unique feature called the “Evo-lution Kit” which houses the brain of the TV. This cartridge can easily be removed by the user and upgraded with a newer one, allowing Samsung’s 7000 series and above TVs to upgrade to a faster proces-sor and newer software, which allows for futureproofing. To help facilitate these new features, the

way one interacts with their television has also been modernized. The lowly re-mote no longer relies on infrared, which requires line-of-sight with the TV’s in-frared receiver. Higher tier sets now typi-cally come with two remotes: a classic with full number pad, volume, channel, and other familiar keys and a “smarter”, pared down remote with only the most used buttons (channel, volume, power, etc.) These newer remotes also use Blue-tooth, enabling them to be used anywhere within 30 ft of the television. Additionally,

“smarter” remotes from LG (dubbed the “Magic Wand”) and Samsung (“Smart Re-mote”) have built-in gyroscopes, allow-ing them to interpret movements of the remote in midair, translating it to a cur-sor on screen. Additionally, Panasonic’s smart remote, along with Samsung’s and LG’s, have a built-in microphone, allow-ing voice commands to be used to perform actions such as changing the channel or volume and voice-to-text web searches to be performed. Samsung’s 64xx, LG’s 6500, and Pansonic’s 600 and above sets

come with these smarter remotes. Sony’s smarter remote lacks the motion gestures and microphone but adds in NFC for quick pair-ing with a compatible mobile de-vice for content sharing. (Sony’s upcoming Android TV-equipped sets will bring Google functional-ity such as voice search into the fray.) With the consolidation of models and the relatively quick adoption to 4K, the television marketplace has never been bet-ter for consumers. With smarter features, smartphone integration, a plethora of non-TV features, and ever-improving picture qual-ity coupled with steadily decreas-ing prices, it’s never been a better time to purchase or upgrade a TV. Every spring / summer TV man-ufacturers begin releasing their latest generation sets and this year will be no different. Nev-ertheless, this guide should serve you well whether choosing one of the models mentioned above or one of the new models hitting the store shelves this year.


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28 www.canadahifi.com

Paradigm Prestige 85F Loudspeakers

If you are a Canadian music or home theatre enthusiast, chances are good that when someone brings up the subject of loudspeakers the first brand name that usually comes to mind will probably be Paradigm. Given the consistency with which this brand has, over three decade, offered such incredibly good value at ev-ery speaker price point, they fully deserve this distinction. Many Canadians and an ever-increasing number of Americans and Europeans have got into this lovely hobby with a pair of Paradigms as their first true high-end speaker and in so many cases, they are so happy with their purchase that whenever they are bitten by the upgrade bug, there is a good chance that they move up to a better Paradigm loudspeaker. The Paradigm recipe for success has always been to strive for innovative de-signs, cutting-edge technology, employ-ing superior materials, keep as much of the manufacturing process in-house and using smart engineering techniques. This has garnered Paradigm hundreds of indus-try awards and positive reviews. Over the past couple of decades, many high-end audio brands have chosen to move all or part of their production over-seas to take advantage of lower labour, material and ancillary costs. Paradigm has chosen a different path. They have chosen to continue to be proudly Cana-dian through and through by continuing to handcraft their products in the true north, strong and free.

Rather than rest on their laurels, the folks at Paradigm have constantly strived not just to maintain but enhance their reputa-tion for offering some of the best perfor-mance, build quality and aesthetics at each speaker price point from entry level to the high 4-figure price range. Their latest

‘Prestige’ range is no exception. The new line offers seven models including three floor-standing models, one bookshelf, two

center channels units and a surround channel option. Two matching sub-woofers will be available this year. What immediately struck me about the new range was the aesthetics. This is by far, the smartest, sleek-est, most elegant look that Paradigm has ever offered. The clean lines have been achieved by utilizing con-cave dust caps and low-diffraction brushed anodized aluminum trim rings. Hiding all the fastening hard-ware from view, unlike many previ-ous models, makes the Prestige Se-ries very pleasing to the eyes. The cabinets have a lovely finish and the magnetically attached grill rounds off this sharp, sophisticated tuxedo look. All the drivers for the Prestige range have been designed and most-ly manufactured in-house in order to achieve higher consistency and tighter tolerances. The cabinets are cloaked in real Walnut hardwood ve-neer and offered in a choice of gloss finishes. The Walnut option offers a smooth satin finish with a nice wood grain, while the Midnight Cherry and Piano Black choices give you a hand-rubbed, high-gloss finish. My review sample was the Prestige 85F speaker in a Midnight Cherry finish ($2,349 each). The unpacking of the speakers was quite straightforward. Sitting atop the speakers was the owners’ man-ual and footer instructions. I spent some time reading through the man-ual and was heartened to see that it very thoughtfully included not just the usual instructions and informa-tion but also tips on how to position the speakers so as to get the mini-mum possible interference from the acoustics of the listening room. It also included advice on how to choose an appropriate amplifier and this included the sage advice that you are more likely to damage

productreviewMalcolm J. Gomes

design | features

www.ca.yamaha.com

speakers with under-powered amplifiers rather than overpowered ones. The 85F has a stainless steel and alumi-num base that is designed not just to iso-late and subdue cabinet vibrations but also to make it easy to switch from the hard floor option to the spike setting for carpets. The default setting is for a hard floor and if you have carpet instead, you need to un-screw the footer and reverse the insert so that the speaker sits on spikes that reach through the carpet to give the speakers better coupling to the floor below the car-pet. These are height adjustable to ensure proper alignment of the speakers, which is necessary for optimum performance. A very thoughtful addition is a pair of gloves to let customers handle and move the speakers without damaging the exquisite finish. I would have liked to see Paradigm also include a spirit level to help the cus-tomer achieve the proper alignment. I used the Cardas method to locate the speakers in my auditioning room and af-ter levelling them, I tried to attach speaker cables. I found that the terminals behind the speaker are so close to the floor, I was not able to attach my better speaker ca-bles which happen to be too stiff to bend enough to fit from under the terminals. Paradigm recommended a break-in period of 48 hours so while that was being done, I got clued in with the engineering behind these speakers. The 85F has an unusual 2.5-way cross-over that utilizes three woofers at low fre-quencies while the bass/midrange driver does double duty in handling the human voice and the musical instruments without requiring the “crossing over” to a dedi-cated midrange driver. Also off the beaten path is a pure aluminum dome tweeter de-sign, which Paradigm calls “X-PAL”. This tweeter is protected by a Paradigm propri-etary designed Perforated Phase-Aligned (PPA) Tweeter Lens. The PPA also acts as a phase plug which blocks out-of-phase frequencies with the aim of delivering a smoother, more extended reproduc-tion of the high frequencies especially at higher volume levels. The tweeter also has a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) op-timized pole piece which helps focus the magnet’s energy to boost efficiency and response time while lowering the tweet-ers resonance frequency, with the aim of delivering cleaner, more accurate sound.

The tweeter mechanism is cooled with a ferrofluid made by Ferrotec. This fluid is a colloidal suspension of magnetic nano particles in a liquid carrier with low vola-tility and high thermal stability. The cabinet is constructed from heavy-duty 3/4-inch MDF with optimally placed interior bracing to minimize resonance. The front baffle has a thickness of one inch to help it maintain its composure even when the excursions of the cones of the driver units attached to it are at their maximum. The excursions of the cones have been enhanced to deliver a gain of 3dB. This has been achieved by using Paradigm’s patented Active Ridge Tech-nology (ART) surrounds which are made in-house and which have been over-mold-ed directly onto each cone. The surrounds are made from injection-moulded thermo-plastic elastomer, which, according to Par-adigm, make them more reliable, durable and longer lasting. Paradigm has also put in a lot of work to make the spider work better and have greater longevity. The spi-ders in the driver units of the Prestige se-ries are now made out of Nomex, which is apparently 10-times, stronger than the cot-ton based variety that is ubiquitous in the industry. The driver unit die-cast baskets have also been reinforced and now have heat sinks integrated into them to enable them to handle higher power levels there-by enabling them to produce better bass and dynamics while suffering from less power compression. The mid-woofers and woofers now have a 1.5-inch voice coil motor with Kapton formers and Nomex collars along with wire / insulation that can withstand higher temperatures up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit / 315°C. To complement all the advances in the driver units Paradigm has equipped the Prestige Series with more technologically advanced crossover networks. These now contain high voltage film and bi-polar ca-pacitors, heavy gauge inductors and bet-ter performing ceramic stand-off resistors. According to Paradigm, these crossovers allow the various driver units to work more seamlessly to blend the high, mid and low frequencies of the music into a more cohesive whole. A big problem with many of the reason-ably priced speakers I have auditioned is the way the vibration from the driver units creeps into the speaker enclosure causing

them to resonate and adversely effect the quality of the reproduced sound. Para-digm has addressed this by using butyl rubber driver fasteners that are employed in tandem with critically placed isolation inserts and gaskets that do a much better job at decoupling the driver units from the speaker enclosure. This minimizes the tendency of the enclosure to resonate and thereby produce sounds in disharmony with the driver units. All this technology allows the Prestige Series to deliver a frequency response of plus or minus 2dB from 40 Hz to 20 kHz on axis and from 40 Hz to 17 kHz off axis. The sensitivity is at a relatively high 93 dB in a normal room and 90 dB in an an-echoic chamber. This helps them deliver very satisfying sound pressure levels even with more modestly powered amplifiers. The recommended power range for ampli-fiers to be used with the 85F is from 15 to 350 watts, with the maximum recom-mended input power capped at 200 watts. This means that if you do use amplifiers that deliver over 200 watts RMS per chan-nel, you have to use caution when turning up the volume as pushing the pedal to the metal here could damage the speakers. Despite their relatively compact dimen-sions, the 85F weighs in at 26 kilos (57 pounds) each, reflecting the superior build quality. The speakers stand 41 inches tall, have an 12.125-inch width and a 14.75-inch depth, with spiked feet, terminal cups and the grille installed. There is no doubt that the Paradigm Prestige Series is bursting with spank-ing new technology and has been built to much higher tolerances than their prede-cessors. However they have big shoes to fill because they have descended from a line of highly regarded speakers and this venerable lineage would automatically send expectations sky high.

I tried the 85F with various speaker cables and ended up using the Analysis Plus Big Silver Oval which is a splendid cable and which had the flexibility to fit from under the very low placed speaker terminals. I tried the 85F with various am-plifiers including the Bryston B4 ST, the Ayre V3, the Ars Sonum Filarmonia, and the Pass Labs XA100.8. They definitely sounded the best, especially in the mid-

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performance

range and bass, with the XA100.8 so that is what I used to conduct the review. I began the audition with Ana Caram’s

“Viola Fora de Moda”, a Chesky produc-tion and a track with an incredible amount of subtleties and nuances. Most of the similarly priced speakers that I have audi-tioned in the past, struggled to accurately play this ultra challenging track. Not so, the 85F. It was able to reproduce most of the micro details with aplomb, albeit with not as much air between the instruments as I would like. I would have also liked the sonic reproduction to be a bit more relaxed and more grain free. Ana’s voice was rendered with a good deal of presence and naturalness but with slightly less body compared to the best speakers in this price class. To see how the 85F performed with male vocals I pulled out the hallowed “Halle-lujah” by Leonard Cohen. This baritone maestro has a voice that you can feel in your gut if reproduced well. Through the 85F, Cohen came through surpris-ingly well. The voice emanated from dead center stage and was as stable and three-

dimensional as I have ever heard it. The only fly in the ointment was a thin veil that slightly masked some of the incred-ible texture of Leonard Cohen’s voice. I then switched to the instrumental ver-sion of “I’m a fool to want you” by the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio. This track has a real tour de force piano performance by Yamamoto. Being a piano player myself, I am very familiar with how a piano sounds at a live performance. I am also quite cog-nisant of how difficult it is for any speaker to reproduce piano notes accurately. Hith-erto, the vast majority of speakers I have heard, that deliver a piano performance with all its intricate majesty intact, car-ried a five-figure price tag. The 85F did a commendable job of this given its price, but there was a subtle sonic metallic sheen over the plinking ivory notes and a slight lack of sparkle with piano notes from around middle C and higher. Next up was L’Daddy by John Newton Howard and Friends, which is a Sheffield Lab production featuring a superb percus-sion performance. Here the 85F was really in its element. It reproduced the drums

and other percussion instruments with the same slam and dynamism as some speak-ers at twice the price. Even at high volume levels generating an SPL of around 108dB (A weighted) these speakers performed with surprisingly little compression and distortion. It was then time for my bass torture track, which is from the Happy Coat album fea-turing the great Ray Brown on double bass. I played “Willow Weep for Me”. This track has Ray Brown as his best, robustly plucking the double bass as only he can. Most speakers find this track so difficult to handle; it has made some models even in the $9,000 dollar price range, lose some of their composure. The response from the 85F was interesting to say the least. At low volumes, it took the double bass in stride, but as I raised the sound pressure level to around 104 dB, there was a hint of distor-tion in the form of an audible rattle. The 85F handled the track better than most other similarly priced speakers I have au-ditioned, in that, it was able to maintain its composure at volume levels that bothered many other speakers at this price point.

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www.adsumaudio.com

The new technology used in the 85F tweeter has resulted in better dispersion, which has significantly improved the to-nality and timbral accuracy. It has also widened the sweet spot and sound stage

significantly. The 85F has one of the best implementations of an aluminum tweeter that I have heard from any speaker at this price point. Generally speaking, alumi-num tweeters have a few inherent short-

comings, including harsh-ness and stridency that tends to increases listening fatigue when listening to music for long periods of time. Kudos to the engineers at Paradigm for being able to control many of these deficiencies and bring the performance of their aluminum tweeter a bit closer to what one gets from the better implement-ed beryllium and silk dome tweeters which have a pen-chant for delivering music with superior delineation, smoothness and ease. Para-digm offers beryllium tweet-ers in its top-of-the-line Sig-nature Collection. The woofers in the 85F also represent good imple-mentation of aluminum cones. They keep a lot of their composure even at relatively high volume lev-els and have the ability of delivering a fair amount of the dynamic contrast, full-ness and tunefulness that you usually find in speakers equipped with carbon fibre cone woofers. Having said that, most speakers with car-bon fibre woofers usually cost around twice as much as the 85F. At moderate vol-ume levels the 85F is one of the best overall performers in its price range. However, at low volume levels, there is slightly more loss of detail, less meat on the bone, than some of the better speakers at this price. At high volume levels the 85F is at the top of its price class despite its pre-dilection of losing a bit of its composure during chal-lenging musical peaks. The unusually smooth blending of the various driver units

makes it very apparent that the 85F has superior quality crossover networks. If your listening repertoire contains a lot of deep bass organ music, it would behove you to mate the 85F to one or two high quality subwoofers that are fast enough to keep up with these speakers. When I played Lindenkirche Berlin by Gerhard Oppelt, the 85F rolled off the lowest oc-tave but when mated to a pair of JL Audio f112 subs, the combination delivered this organ-heavy track without truncating the notes below 40Hz, thus telling the whole sonic story. Paradigm offers a stable of world class subwoofers and if you are an organ music aficionado, you will not be hard-pressed for choice when selecting a Paradigm sub that will dance well with the 85F. Aesthetically I could not fault the 85F. It is easily one of the most sleek and el-egant speakers you can buy in this price category and the wife acceptance is likely to be very high. I find it hard to imagine any décor that they would not just comple-ment but actually enhance. With the Prestige Series, Paradigm has optimized the advantages that it has over many other speaker manufacturers - the ability to design, engineer, fabricate, as-semble and measure all of their speakers in-house. This allows them to achieve significantly better quality control, tighter tolerances and offer customers more reli-ability across the board. If you are in the market for a pair of speakers in the $4,500 range and if aes-thetics as well as build quality matter to you as much as sound quality, you would be well advised to give the Paradigm Pres-tige 85F a serious audition. Chances are good, you will be seduced into make these sonic babies a treasured part of your mu-sic system!


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quickinfo

Paradigmwww.paradigm.com (905) 696-2868

Paradigm Prestige 85F Floor Standing SpeakersPrice: $2,149 CDN / each (Walnut, Black Walnut and Piano Black); $2,349 CDN / each (Midnight Cherry)

Chester Group Exhibitions. Show Organisers. All Intellectual rights reserved.

VANCOUVERAUDIOSHOW 8-10 MAY 2015HILTON METROTOWN

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CAPITALAUDIOFESTHILTON HOTEL - ROCKVILLE, MD. AUG 28-30 2015

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www.canadahifi.com 35

How many audio components can really stand up to the test of time? How many audio components inspire real affection? Does your mind turn to the Quad Electro-static Speaker, the Krell KSA-50 Class A Amp, the Linn Sondek Turntable, the NAD 3020 Integrated Amp or the Acous-tic Research AR3a Speaker? Well in my book, the Spendor BC1 Speaker, which I purchased in 1973, belongs firmly in that pantheon, as does its smaller brother the LS3/5A. My system at that time includ-ed a Rotel 610 Amp, a Thorens TD125 Turntable with a Shure V15 cartridge and an Akai Tuner. We were all told that the speakers contributed by far the most to the sound of the system, and that’s where you should spend your money. The Spen-dors were my pride and joy. Only later did Linn’s Ivor Tiefenbrun turn our world view on its head with his insistence on the importance of the source. His mantra -

“Garbage in – Garbage out”. Spendor was the creation of Spencer Hughes, an engineer working at the BBC, and tasked with the investigation of new plastic cone materials for BBC monitor-ing purposes. After much experimenta-tion he came up with the first Bextrone cone, and developed a speaker using an 8” driver with a Celestion HF1300 tweeter. The crossover used a large multitap auto-transformer, allowing precise calibration of each speaker to meet the very high BBC standards. A year or so later a Coles supertweeter was added to the design, partly for tax reasons, and partly to detect interference in the new 625 line standard being introduced for television broadcast-ing around that time. The commercial version of this BBC speaker, the Spendor BC1, was a big hit with audiophiles because of its sublime midrange. The bass was nothing to write home about, and the treble, despite the presence of that supertweeter, rolled off significantly at the higher frequencies. But music is primarily in the midrange, and

the main driver, unique to Spen-dor, crossed over to the tweeter at a high 3 kHz. This meant there was no cross-over in the vital presence region, perhaps the key factor in the great midrange r e p r o d u c t i o n . The cabinet con-struction was also unusual. Rather than hav-ing stiff side-walls, as most speakers then and now aspire to, the BC1 had thin Baltic birch ply panels which were lined with bitumen pads. These panels were designed to dis-perse vibrations at lower frequencies than more rigid boxes, avoiding the higher fre-quency vibrations that colour the sound more noticeably. Front and back panels are attached by screws, also designed to dissipate rather than prevent vibrations. So this is certainly a speaker to fail the knuckle test, and deliberately so. I loved the BC1 speaker. Music sound-ed like music. But I also had a problem. I kept blowing the drivers. I must have gone through about 5 bass drivers. Every time I did, Spendor would ship me a new one without complaint. I kept these speak-ers for six years until I left the country, selling all my gear in the process. So much for history. The Spendor BC1 stayed in production until the Celestion HF1300 tweeter was discontinued in 1994. In 2000 Spendor Audio was acquired by Philip Swift of AudioLab. Terry Miles (Head of Engineering) and Philip Swift have created a Classic line to recreate the essence of the earlier designs using cur-rent technology, as well as the A Line and D Line series and the range topping ST. Today’s direct descendent of the BC1 is the Classic SP1/2R².

The smaller SP2/1R² is a successor to the 1994 Spendor SP3, developed along simi-lar principles to the BC1 but in a smaller frame.

The SP3/1R² is the second model in the range of 5 Classic speakers. It’s a two-way with an 18cm woofer and 22mm tweeter in a cherry or dark walnut box which mea-sures 40 x 22 x 28 cms (HWD) and weighs 9.5Kg. At the rear you will find an unusu-ally large port and two sets of connectors for biwiring, with hard jumpers provided. A large fabric grill covers the entire front and you don’t need to remove it for good sound. Spendor has worked hard to make the weave acoustically transparent and the geometry of the apertures in the sup-porting frame was calculated to make all the frame edges acoustically ‘invisible’. If you do want to remove it, then you need to press in with both palms near the top of the grill, stretching the fabric, and you will find a frame that you can pull towards you. Once removed, you can see the dome tweeter and the cone driver. In common with the BC1, the Classic speaker still uses a thin wall construction, albeit of MDF rather than birch, and it still has individually calibrated crossovers for pair matching within 1dB. Bextrone has given way to a superior ep3 Polymer and

productreviewPhil Gold

design | features

Spendor Audio Classic SP3/1R² Speakers

the crossover frequency has been pushed up to 3.7kHz. The large rear port is well rounded and works at a low air speed, re-ducing port noises and reflection issues. The cabinet size and shape is traditional, being wider than many current competi-tors. As you would expect for a speaker of this size, the bass is ultimately limited in its depth and volume, while the treble is not quite as open as you might find on today’s best Totem or B&W. But the mid-band is simply wonderful. Even smoother and more refined than the BC1, if memory serves. So, new materials, a smaller box, fewer

drivers, but this is clearly a modern rela-tive of the famous BC1 and it is instruc-tive to see how well this update stands to-day. I don’t want you to think this is even a new update. This particular iteration has been around for at least six years, and is still made in the UK factory. Spendor sells them for the relatively modest price of $3695. Over the years Spendor has re-fined every element of the design and I should mention a few of the features they are most proud of:

• Deep formed ep38 polymer cone derived from Spendor ST technology

• Spendor/BBC with thin critically damped MDF panels

• Magnet motor pole phase correction• High saturation linear 3 terminal induc-tors

• Low distortion 38mm motor in the bass/midrange driver

• Excellent overall coherence due to the fine integration of the two drivers They are certainly well finished with beautiful wood grain and nice beveled edges on the front of the speaker to avoid interaction with the tweeter. The whole point of these BBC derived designs is to be able to reproduce the ex-act timbre of live acoustic music. To do so you need a very flat response and no overhang on the bass notes, and you need the transient response in the midrange and treble to be matched in the bass, even if the ultimate level is lower. And there’s none of that low bass hump that most speakers have to fool the ear into think-ing the bass is extended. It’s quality that’s wanted, not quantity. The BC1 was origi-nally designed as a studio monitor so the Beeb could tell just what it was pushing out onto the airwaves, and in particular to optimize the position and selection of microphones. Bigger versions such as the LS5/5 might be more appropriate for large symphony orchestras and smaller moni-tors such as the LS3/5A were optimized for portable use. A measure of their suc-cess is the proliferation of models from companies such as KEF, Harbeth, Rogers and Spendor, while other manufacturers such as Linn drew extensively on BBC de-signs without attribution. So these speak-ers should appeal most to those who want to accurately reproduce the sound of voic-es, strings, percussion and wind instru-ments. Electric guitar and synthetic music

may require different attributes, and the BBC itself chose different speakers for its pop music broadcasts and recordings, ones capable of much more volume and deep bass.

What’s the hardest thing to reproduce? Lot’s of reviewers pick the female voice, which some speakers mess up because their crossover is imperfect and such im-perfections are highlighted by the high female voice, whose tones and overtones can easily occur around the crossover point. But any competent speaker today should not show such a weakness and most serious contenders do a good job with all voices. The real game changer is the concert grand piano. Very few speak-ers have the full measure of a grand piano. Too many make extensive use of port tuning to artificially boost the bass. This leads to an extended low frequency re-sponse but also one which is lumpy, slow and interacts badly with rear walls or cor-ners. Spendor’s SP3/1R² uses port tuning, but very gently, to extend the response somewhat over a sealed box. So the Spen-dor’s deep bass is tuneful and fast but not as full bodied as others. I’ll buy that any day – it’s an error of omission not an error of commission. So I looked for some spectacularly good piano recordings and I came up with Can-ada’s own Marc-André Hamelin playing Shchedrin’s 2nd Piano Concerto [Hyper-ion SACDA67425]. Compared with my reference YG Carmel and Totem’s The One, the former much more expensive, the latter comparable in price but even smaller, the Spendor is certainly less dy-namic and shaded down in the treble. But the piano has size and grandeur, excellent colouring, and strong articulation. The Totem is more forward and open while the YG ($18k) reproduces all the extreme passion and scale the others cannot match. That’s why you pay the big bucks. The Spendor is also more muted on the wind and brass instruments that knock you off your feet with the Totem and Carmel. But the Spendor excels with string tone and in presenting a cohesive image across the stage and in three dimensions. It has no issue with the cellos or even the double bass. The top-end reticence is revealed when the finale switches from classical

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Spendor’s Philip Swift adds:Recently the BC1 was our inspiration for the new Spendor D7. Our objective with the D7 was not to re-create a BC1 but to achieve substantial advances in sound quality by the application of in-novative and elegant engineering – just as Spencer Hughes had done over 40 years ago. Numerous independent re-ports and supporting lab measurements indicate we have succeeded in meet-ing this difficult challenge. The D7 achieves outstanding resolution, finesse and seamless sound delivery across the whole sound spectrum with almost no colouration, virtually no audible sound output from the cabinet, and it will play loud and hard if required. In contrast, with a Spendor Classic loudspeaker (including the SP3/1R²), the cabinet is allowed to move slight-ly but always in total harmony with the music. This imparts a warmth and charm to the sound which you simply won’t hear with any modern loud-speaker. Many listeners find it irresist-ible, and the ideal way to enjoy their music! Over the past 10 years all our Spendor Classic drivers and crossovers have been significantly refined. The re-sult is that today’s Classics offer all the sound quality advantages of their dis-tinguished predecessors but with a far more dynamic (but still totally natural) sound and all models have substantial power handling and, thanks to modern polymer and adhesive technology, ex-tremely robust drivers.

idiom to modern jazz and the brushes lack the shimmer the other speakers reveal. For solo piano I chose a very unusual recording – Art Tatum Piano Starts Here [Sony Zenph SACD 88697-22218-2]. This Zenph SACD recording quickly reveals the nature of the speakers. The shy treble is again noticeable next to the Totem and YG Carmel, and the dynamics are lower too. But you can easily tell it’s a Yamaha piano, and once you get used to the presentation you can relax and enjoy it. The speaker does not overload on tran-sient peaks, and the sonorities are clear and lifelike. The image is well projected too.

But let’s get away from a machine play-ing the piano and move on to one of my favourite jazz pianists of the modern era, Benny Green, an inspiration for Diana Krall and others. On his 1991 recording Greens [Blue Note CDP 7964852] Benny plays with Christian McBride on bass and Carl Allen on drums. “Bish Bash” will tell you in seconds why you want these par-ticular speakers. The piano is in the room, and the musicians play together with mas-sive coherency and intimacy. It’s a joy to hear McBride bowing his bass. Benny Green is funky and tight, and Allen pro-vides supple and restrained support. The speakers sound very comfortable working at realistic levels here. Let’s try the female vocalist test any-ways. Spendor is kind to Joan Baez on

“Diamonds & Rust” [Vanguard VCD3-125/7] giving each instrument a precise location and timbre, while capturing the warmth of her voice that can often sound shrill. Norah Jones “Don’t Know Why” from Come Away With Me [Blue Note 724354174728] shows just how far re-cording has come since the seventies. It is sensational through the Spendors. Her voice is more centred and less fragile than I remember, and the sound of the piano is amazingly clear and colourful. Even the percussion sounds just right. Now we should check out some clas-sical chamber music, which should be playing to the Spendor’s strengths. The Spendors did not sound as I had expected them to sound. No. They were even bet-ter. So alive! No trace of any limitations at frequency extremes here, and no dimi-nution of dynamics either. When you play the type of music for which they are op-timized they are ruthless, precise, tonally rich and very detailed. They throw a to-tally believable image into the room. The Jerusalem Quartet’s Shostakovich [Har-monia Mundi HMG 508392.93] is savage, rhythmic, astringent and lyrical by turn, and the Spendors follow all of these turns. Equally impressive on Mozart Piano Concertos [EMI 724355780324] the Spendors will stand up to any other speak-er here. The perfection of piano and string tone, the speed of transients and the ability to sustain the pedal notes, the absolute fi-delity of tone colour - all add up to a com-plete performance. Sensational realism. So if this is the music they were born to

play, what should I throw at them to trip them up? Jimi Hendricks of course [Ex-perience 0881129842]. All that heavy dis-tortion-filled guitar work from Hendricks himself, and Noel Redding’s powerful bass should have the Spendors running for cover. It was music like this that blew the woofers off my old BC1s. “Purple Haze” has admirable power in the midrange, but a deep flood of bass power was only hinted at, missing the drive and energy this music needs. The song simply sounded too clean for my taste. However things improved on the gentler track “The Wind Cries Mary” with “Hey Joe” falling somewhere in be-tween. But the speakers seemed to be say-ing “Why are you playing this – give me something I can understand”. What about the Beatles? Dylan? You need have few worries there. The folk singing Dylan could not meet a better match. Just a few Beatles tracks (“Some-thing”, “I Want You (She’s So heavy)” or

“Helter Skelter”) might enjoy a bit more bass power but the voices come through clear, warm and rich. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Blackbird” and “Lady Madonna” really respond to the accuracy, pace and imaging the Spendors provide. If you can live within its limitations, the Spendor SP3/1R² is a very special speaker. It makes beautiful music and it has one of the best midranges known to man. Music just flows from it, colourful and rich as you will find. It isn’t just a throwback to the old BC1. It improves on it by the use of improved driver geometry and materi-als and the refinements made by a vigilant manufacturer over the last 45 years. It’s also amplifier friendly, happily partner-ing with amps both tube and silicon based. England isn’t finished yet.

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Spendor Audiowww.spendoraudio.com

Distributed in Canada by Bluebird Musicwww.bluebirdmusic.com416-638-8207

Spendor Audio Classic SP3/1R² SpeakersPrice: $3,695 CAD

Reperformances by Zenph

This is a Zenph Reperformance of orig-inal recordings made by Art Tatum, the pianist to end all pianists, in 1933 and 1949. The blurb reads: Zenph takes audio performances and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicat-ing what was originally recorded. The Zenph software-based process extracts every musical nuance of a recorded performance and stores the data in a high-resolution digital file. These re-performance files contain every detail of how every note was played, including pedal actions, volume and articulation – all with micro-second timings. The re-performance files are played back on a real acoustic piano fitted with sophisticated computers and hardware, letting the listener “sit in the room” as if he or she were there when the original recording was made. The re-performance is then recorded afresh, using the latest microphones and recording techniques, to modern-ize monophonic or poor-quality re-cordings of great performances. Sadly, the process was not perfect, and the Yamaha piano is quite different from (and warmer than) the one Art Ta-tum would have played. Other Zenph reperformances involve Glenn Gould, Rachmaninoff and Oscar Peterson. Ze-nph went belly up in 2012, but these re-cordings are all interesting in their own right, if not fully capturing the original fire and artistry.


VPI Scout Turntable

My earliest memories of music listening involve a turntable. In the mid-70’s, as a young child (I date myself), my father had one of those huge console stereo cabinets, a Capehart console - Google it and you’ll get my drift. It had an integrated amplifi-er, two-way speakers, 8-track player, AM/FM tuner, and jukebox style auto-changer turntable. Though that turntable was far from a quality / hi-fidelity playback in-strument, I always found myself sucked in by the warm, often crackly, yet com-forting sound of vinyl LPs played at fam-ily huddles. As time went by, my brother and I jumped into the music of the 80’s and eventually convinced our dad to upgrade the family stereo, which included a Tech-nics SL-QD2 fully-auto direct-drive turn-table and Ortofon cartridge. Compact Disc (CD) was just coming in and com-pact cassettes were a competing media. Though I always preferred the sound of vinyl to cassette, as vinyl sounded notice-ably cleaner and more open, I regarded CD as the ultimate – why? Thinking back, CD had a high-tech look, compact form, was noiseless and sounded quicker, hard-er and more incisive, which seemed to work for the pop, amped rock and British new wave music that filled my listening repertoire. However, in those days, lis-tening to music for realness or musicality was never the case. Eventually the turntable got less play and the CD player took front stage in my ever evolving stereo system. I actually kept that original Technics turntable in play until 2008, when I replaced it with a Goldring GR1.2 turntable that up to now has been my regular spinner. With the Goldring, and the amazing quality of 180 gram audiophile pressings, my vinyl interest was fully re-energized. I now ap-preciated the texture, flow and rightness that vinyl can provide. Around the same time, I came across an article in Sound & Vision magazine entitled, “Sound & Vi-

sion’s Vinyl Lis-tening Club”. It captured the ex-citement, enjoy-ment and plea-sure of a friendly vinyl listening meet-up. Within the pages, there were pictures and fond men-tion of a VPI HW-19 MK-3, as well as a VPI record vacuum. The article sucked me right in and I’ve never forgotten it nor VPI, though it’s taken me until now to get one of their turntables into my listening room.

Before I get into telling you about the Scout, a little background on VPI Indus-tries is in order. The company was found-ed in 1978 by Sheila and Harry Weisfeld. Their first product was a record weight, then a turntable isolation base and in 1981 a record cleaning machine – the HW-16. VPI’s first turntable product – the origi-nal HW-19 turntable was followed by the MK2, MK3 and then MK4. VPI contin-ues to be best known for its turntable and vinyl cleaning machines and has been busy introducing fresh new models over the last several years. The company re-mains a family owned business with all its products built in Cliffwood, New Jersey of the U.S.A. – a fact that the company is most proud of. The Scout was up to recently, VPI’s most affordable turntable; however, over the last couple years VPI has introduced some other more affordable models, in-cluding the Nomad, Traveler and just last year the Scout Jr. The Aries Scout was in-troduced over a decade ago, followed by the Scout with acrylic platter, which pre-ceded the Scout 2, released in 2009. This brings us to the Scout that was launched in 2013; essentially a Scout 2 with a thin-

ner 6061 aluminum platter (1.375” vs. the 2” thick “Classic” platter on the Scout 2) and a different main bearing. This model was originally called the Scout 1.1, but VPI recently renamed it to just Scout. The Scout is a belt driven design with an outboard 600 RPM AC synchronous Hurst motor that VPI has used in different iterations for over 30 years. The solid alu-minum platter, which feels like it weighs 20-lbs, rotates on a hardened, tapered shaft, sitting in an oil bath bearing with PEEK thrust disc and machined graphite-impregnated brass bushings. The plinth is 1.25” thick, made of MDF, covered in a premium textured black vinyl and bonded to a 12 gauge steel plate on four conical anti-resonance feet. Fitted to this body is VPI’s latest iteration of their Scout tonearm, simply referred to as the new JMW Scout Tonearm. This arm is stated to be an improvement over the original JMW 9 arm, with slightly more detail and smoothness. The new JMW Scout Tone-arm is a 9” design and easily identified by its stark black anodized stainless steel and aluminum construction. It allows for full adjustment including VTF, VTA and azimuth, to accommodate almost any car-tridge. A power cord is included, along with detailed instructions on how to set up the turntable properly. There are also a number of setup tools and accessories in the box. These include a screw-down re-cord clamp, custom JMW Memorial pro-tractor, a digital stylus weight gauge with

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leatherette slip cover, an azimuth-setting bar, a mechanical anti-skate device and a couple Allen keys. The Scout was packed incredibly well in layered custom foam cutouts – no doubt here that VPI knows how to ship things right. Assembly was easy enough, fol-lowing the instructions and getting it level posed no issue. Then the big test – mount-ing the Ortofon 2m Red cartridge that VPI provided (a $100 US option), uninstalled. This was my first time mounting a car-tridge so I took my time and followed the instruction manual. Fortunately the in-cluded manual is quite detailed and there are also videos to be found on YouTube, including most recently a couple on the VPI website for the new Scout Jr. and Prime turntables. With a little tinkering I got things to measure all right in about an hour – not bad for a first time but before I started to play records, I had an experi-enced friend confirm my work and apart from a little tweaking on azimuth and VTF, the Scout was good to go. In form, the Scout looks very differ-ent from VPI’s more traditional designs

– their Classic, Classic Signature and Clas-sic Direct and more akin to their modern-istic designs – their Aries and HR-X. It comes only in a semi-gloss textured black finish with silver adornments that include a name plate, corner caps, conical feet and of course the platter and two-tone tonearm. Though there are no hard edges, the Scout comes across as a vixen rather than a lady. Sexy – oh yes, cool – for sure and solidly built – no doubt about that. Build and fit is excellent but the finish, though functional and forgiving of blemish / handprints is nothing to rave about. The tonearm is a work of art with its unipivot design which offers almost frictionless performance. I did find the motor produced some initial noise, which settled in with break-in but it never reached the totally silent level I hoped for. I never heard it when playing, even during the quietest passages – so I might be a little fussy on this point. VPI does offer a 300 RPM motor upgrade op-tion for $150 US, which I expect will be exceptionally silent. VPI offers a 3-year warranty on its turntables, so you are well covered, should anything not be up to spec.

I began listening critically to the Scout

once it had 100+ hours on it. My evalua-tion was done in my reference two-chan-nel system, consisting of a Pro-Ject Pho-nobox II SE phonostage, Simaudio 350p preamplifier, Bryston 4B-SST2 amplifier and quadral Aurum Montan VIII loud-speakers. Wiring was all Nordost Norse 2 Heimdall 2 cables. Power was provided by a Nordost QB8 power distributor. I also used a set of Audio Physic VCF III Double Component sound optimizer feet for isolation under the turntable. The car-tridge, as mentioned earlier, was a VPI supplied Ortofon 2m Red. Beginning with something slow and soulful, a 180 gram RTI audiophile press-ing of Anne Bisson’s Blue Mind album, I dropped the needle on the third track:

“Hoping Love Will Last”. Soft piano key-strokes were delivered with their delicate details and accompanied by the glow and sweet resonance of the instrument. Anne’s voice was clear, centred and lifelike, with her emotion conveyed convincingly. This ushered in the slow but sonorous bass drum thumps – amazing in their richness, depth and energy. The bloom of the piano keys was juxtaposed against the crystal-line clarity of cymbal taps. No doubt, the Scout was showing itself to have mastery of both delicacy and strength. The render-ing of the drum strikes was impeccable, with a tangible sound to the sticks striking the skins – their speed, so well preserved. The presentation proved to be layered front to back - bass drums lying deepest, drum strikes a little more forward and Anne in front, as well as with appreciable breadth. Elements were realistic in size, precise in location and having a natural feel. I also noticed the utter silence in which these elements resided – partly due to the quality of the pressing but no doubt preserved by the performance of the Scout with its JMW Scout tonearm. Given the low cost of the cartridge, I was surprised to hear so much and so well delivered. On another occasion, I put on Ray Mont-ford’s album, a fragile balance, and the song “the healing”, thanks to slow pluck-ing of Ray’s guitar and a ghostly reverb sounded enchanting. The depth of the soundstage was cavernous and percus-sion reached both deep and wide, most noticeably to the right. Here I heard a sweetness and delicacy from this LP that I had not managed to extract before – it’s

thrilling to discover an album anew and that’s just what the Scout was enabling me to do. Moving to the next track “arrival”, one of my favorite on this album, the gui-tar strings came across with impressive texture and precision – very lifelike and present in their nature. I found that the Scout handled the pace of the music well, as evidenced by the involuntary bobbing of my head, as this rhythmic composition played through. The VPI table was also able to give me a feel of the emotion of the band as they dug into the tune. Listening to the bongo play, the variations of hand and finger slaps came across clearly, al-lowing me to easily imagine a live setting. I wasn’t just hearing the music, but rather the Scout was letting me feel it. One night my brother was over with his wife and kids. I mentioned that I had “a real cool looking table in for re-view”. Next, we were in my studio, where I quickly poked through my collection for something appropriate. What I picked out was Steve Windwood’s Higher Love LP. My brother and I bought this album

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Audio Physic VCF III Double Component Feet

Audio Physic VCF III Double Compo-nent sound optimizer feet come in sets of 4, with each foot handling up to 20 kg and have a diameter of 65 mm. They are designed for use with both compo-nents and loudspeakers. Using the Audio Physic VCF III sound optimizers with the VPI Scout provided a noticeable and considerable increase in sonic performance. Addi-tional clarity and detail was gained with the feet in place and bass frequencies gained both depth and articulation. The overall impression of images within the soundstage also became more natural and dimensional.

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together back in 1986 and I knew we hadn’t listened to it together in at least 25 years! Still in great condition, I put it on, dropped down the clamp and got it spin-ning. Both of us were caught like fish on hooks and before you know it, a couple songs turned into a whole album – both sides. There was so much clarity to the elements, so much separation and then the imaging and soundstaging – which too came across so vividly. Though the recording definitely has some compres-sion, the arrangements are well done and the instrumentation offers an opportunity to take in the individual lines as well as the sum of the parts. On the opening song, “Higher Love”, the drum strikes were clear and detailed, while reaching out beyond the front wall of my room and sitting fairly high. Steve’s voice was centred, recessed behind the front plane of the speakers. I noticed how stable and anchored images were, which just helped with the realism. The next track, “Take It As It Comes” had both of us bopping our heads to the percussion given the rhyth-mic pace of this track. The Scout was able

to nail the timing – PRAT (Pace, Rhythm, and Timing) were all there in spades. On

“Freedom Overspill” the bass guitar and drums were delivered with a visceral en-ergy. Again here, I was transfixed by the tautness, speed and depth of the bass and drums. Another original pressing that had me enthralled when played on the Scout, was The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Gone With the Wind LP. Though not the quietest of pressings, what it misses on noise floor it much more than makes up in transpar-ency, vibrancy and sheer realism. The Scout was able to generate an impressive three dimensional soundstage with fault-less instrument placement. The playing of the snare drum relayed the swats and the slaps of sticks on the drum-skin in a sur-real manner. There was both delicacy and finesse in the portrayal of the instruments and low level details were brought forth with aplomb. The upright bass plucks had fullness with a reverent echo of the space in which it was being played, and its posi-tion was clearly revealed at the back of the soundstage. Here I was sitting, within the

confines of my room, with a band play-ing before me – what more could one ask for…a Scotch, of course. What more can I say, exploring my record collection with the Scout has been enlight-ening, engaging and downright good fun! If ever I needed another reason to listen to more vinyl – the VPI Scout has given me one. Though my Goldring GR1.2 reintro-duced me to the pleasure and sweetness of vinyl, the Scout has given me reason to never let it go. The Scout offers high value out of the box and an easy upgrade path when the time is right. Visit your lo-cal VPI dealer and give the Scout a listen, if this vixen doesn’t seduce you, you’ll definitely have fun in her efforts.

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VPI Industrieswww.vpiindustries.com [email protected]

VPI Scout TurntablePrice: $1,995 US

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