The Vinyl Anachronist: It was twenty years ago today…

By Marc Phillips

December 2006

The Vinyl Anachronist's Michell Orbe

Rega P3 in green!

VPI Scout

Continuum Caliburn

When Michael Jones informed me that this issue was going to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of AudioEnz, and asked me to talk about advances and changes in analog over the same time period, I asked him what he thought were the most important developments.

“That vinyl has survived it all,” was his first reply. He followed this, of course, with the fact that many turntables, arms, and cartridges are still being made; that good performance can now be had for so little money (Pro-Ject and Rega); the general move away from turntables with sprung suspensions, a la AR and Linn; and the rise of the outboard phono stage, which is the first thing I thought of when he asked me the same question.

Vinyl has survived it all. I think that’s the most amazing facet of any analog discussion in the year 2006, that we’re still spinning the big black discs, and there’s no end in sight. Sure, we still have to preface that statement, as usual, by saying that LPs and turntables and tonearms and cartridges and phono stages are discussed on a much smaller scale than they were twenty years ago, and the LP is not about to dislodge the compact disc from its perch at the top of the format mountain any time soon. But analog fans don’t need to play King of the Mountain anymore. We’re perfectly happy hanging out in one of the valleys at the base of that mountain, where we’re definitely living the good life.

Who could ask for anything more?

I can remember sitting in the bleachers at a Little League baseball field in Virginia, roughly twenty years ago, watching my nephew play center field. (He’s well into his thirties now, and has four kids.) In my lap I held the brand new issue of Stereophile, its cover sporting the new SOTA Star Sapphire turntable, with the just-introduced SME V tonearm. Inside, none other than J. Gordon Holt himself proclaimed this combination to be the pinnacle of sound reproduction, the best he’d heard up to that point.

He had to temper his comments, of course, against the new digital technologies that were capturing everyone’s attention at the time. Back then, everyone, including me, felt the excitement of the new format. As I’ve said before, I was the first kid on the block with a compact disc player. I actually owned the Sony CDP-101. Crowds of people gathered in my bedroom to hear music emerge from complete silence. They oohed and aahed. I still remember the first CD I ever purchased, Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony performing Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet on the London label. I still have the CD, and it still sounds nice. The CDP-101, however, can’t make the same claim.

I still to this day remember what JGH said about the SOTA/SME combination, however. It haunts me to this day. He said that most technologies are perfected just as they become obsolete. Soon afterward, LPs and turntables and tonearms and cartridges were almost wiped from the face of the earth. I refer to that period, from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s, as the Audio Dark Ages. The backlash against the cold, sterile, harsh, strident sound of early CD players hadn’t quite gained significant momentum yet. The few who openly hated the sound of digital and still preferred analog playback were treated as kooks, heretics. Anti-CD sentiments were few and far between.

I've got to admit it’s getting better

Looking back at that issue of Stereophile, I guess the most obvious thing is that analog playback continued to improve, which no one expected. As nice as the SOTA Star Sapphire was twenty years ago, and while I’m confident it still outperforms almost every digital playback system ever built, it has been surpassed many times over in the last twenty years. At the time, the SOTA retailed for a couple of grand. In 1986, if you had told me that not only would new turntable production continue unabated, but that we’d be seeing turntables such as the US$73,000 Rockport Sirius III, or the US$90,000 Continuum Caliburn, or the US$125,000 Clearaudio Statement, I would have thought you were nuts. Or, I would have given you a great big hug.

Heck, there are tonearm cables that cost more now than the SOTA Star Sapphire did back then. Or record cleaning machines. Or equipment supports. Or cartridges. Lots and lots of cartridges. I remember when one company, Rowland Research I think, introduced a $2500 cartridge, and it created a huge buzz. Now, the second-to-the-bottom model in Koetsu’s line, the Rosewood Standard, costs that much, and the higher models easily cross the five-figure mark. I can think of five or six models of cartridges where the cost of retipping alone surpasses the cost of the SOTA.

All of this is pretty academic, especially when you take twenty years’ inflation into consideration. And we all know that when it comes to the High End, cost and quality don’t always correlate with each other. But like Michael said, good performance can be had for so little money. That’s absolutely true when you look at something like the Rega P3, which existed back in 1986, and is still the best-sounding turntable in its price class, in my opinion. But I’m thinking more along the lines of some of the medium-priced turntables out there, such as the Michell Tecnodec, the VPI Scout, the Roksan Radius5, the Rega P5, and the Nottingham Horizon SE, all relatively new designs. I think this is becoming the most exciting area of analog, because I bet every one of those relatively modest turntables would at least match the performance of that SOTA Star Sapphire, which, forgive the redundancy, was state of the art in 1986.

They’ve been going in and out of style

Maybe the most amazing aspect, however, of analog over the last twenty years, is how little things have changed. The great turntables of twenty years ago still, surprisingly enough, are the great turntables of today. We can start, obviously, with the Linn Sondek LP-12, which still remains the turntable of choice for people like Stereophile’s John Atkinson and Art Dudley. The Linn has gone through several upgrades over the years, and it’s slightly easier to set one up now than in 1986, but for the most part the spirit of the turntable has remained true, and it’s still a stunning achievement.

We can then move onto the Rega Planar 3, which again has gone through some refinement over the years (which is why it’s now called the P3). It had a somewhat inauspicious start, but once Roy Gandy mounted the first RB300 tonearm on its plain MDF plinth, it was an instant success, and it remains so today. It’s still the only sub-US$1000 turntable I really recommend if you’re truly serious about analog.

Then there’s that SME V tonearm. Twenty years ago it was new and exciting, and cost at least as much as the SOTA, which was unusual. Now, I own one, and it’s still considered one of the very best. These days, I prefer the Breuer arm, which existed in a slightly different version twenty years ago, and some of the Schroders, which didn’t. But those arms are up to fifty percent more expensive than the SME, and are just a tad better. The SME V, for many, is still the ultimate statement in tonearms.

There are many more examples, such as the Michell Gyrodec, which has remained relatively unchanged over the years, and a few others. Even the Star Sapphire is still in production, although I haven’t heard one in, say, twenty years or so. But nothing speaks better of the immortality of vinyl than the continued desirability of such classic turntables as the Garrard 301 and 401, the Thorens TD-124, the AR ES-1 and XA, and various Duals. Cottage industries have sprung up everywhere, restoring and modifying these old warhorses into something truly special, something that, amazingly enough, is still competitive fidelity-wise in today’s market. If you doubt this, you need to listen to the $19,000 Shindo-modified Garrard 301.

I’d love to turn you on

Finally, that brings me to what I feel may be the most important development in analog in the last twenty years, the emergence of stand-alone phono preamplification. I was surprised by Art Dudley’s recent comments in Stereophile that he used to absolutely hate the concept of the outboard phono stage, that he abhorred paying separately for something that used to be included for free. I empathize with this somewhat, but I think the phono stage has been truly liberated. Independent power supplies notwithstanding, phono stage technology has grown by leaps and bounds, from those monstrous efforts by Boulder and Manley and ASR to the affordable gems from Graham Slee and Bellari.

Besides, before the outboard phono stage, we never really thought that much about that section of our receivers and preamplifiers before. Sure, I’ve heard comments about the excellence of the phono sections of the modest Advent 300 receiver, or that the phono stages of some McIntosh preamps weren’t quite up to the quality of the line stage, or that the phono preamps on some of the old Scott amps were flexible and really well designed. But now that I think of it, these are all recent discussions. Back in the day, we looked at the phono stage as part of the whole. At least I did.

I do get excited about them now, the little black boxes (I used to call them when they first hit the market). A couple of years ago I got to play with a few, and I was surprised at the differences between them, which were almost as profound as the differences between cartridges. As much as I learned during that period, I find it slightly ironic that I now use the inboard phono preamp on my Yamamoto CA-03L preamp (albeit with not one but two outboard step-up transformers). But I still love the very idea of the separate phono preamp, even though it confuses most analog newbies like nothing else.

When I’m sixty-four

That’s the funny thing… twenty years from now I will be sixty-four. Will I still be listening to vinyl? Will vinyl survive MP3, and music downloading in general? Will my generation still appreciate the tactile joy of spinning LPs? Will the succeeding generations adopt it as well, and for the same reasons, mainly ultimate sound quality?

I genuinely hope so!

Marc Phillips has been writing about hi-fi and music under the Vinyl Anachronist banner since 1998. His earlier columns can be found on the Perfect Sound Forever website. You can discuss vinyl with Marc at Vinylanach@aol.com

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