Spin Doctor

The British audio scene from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was pretty strange. Audio as a hobby was a big deal, with widespread appeal to a much younger crowd than today. Audiophiles were guided by a flurry of what my friends called "hi-fi pornos," audio magazines that filled the racks at the newsagents.

Far more than you see today, there was a strong nationalist bent, with some writers displaying an open bias against anything that wasn't British. Magazines' editorial departments presented readers with a clear, specific doctrine of how a system should be built and what components readers should acquire.

As a schoolboy with no system of my own, I lapped up these suggestions, and when I returned to the US in 1980 to attend university, I was finally able to start building a system that conformed to the system-building rules that had been drilled into me.

To watch as Rega very slowly expands its turntable offerings upmarket requires the patience of a Thomas Pynchon addict waiting for each new tome from the notoriously slow-working and reclusive author. Starting out 51 years ago with just one turntable model, Rega now offers turntables at seven different price levels, plus a few minor variations in between. During the "lost years" of waning turntable and vinyl sales in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rega boss Roy Gandy candidly admits that the company put little effort into advancing its turntable designs, as sales at the time didn't really justify the investment. Rega had shifted its focus to digital source components, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, and even introduced a tube CD player.

That momentum finally started to reverse about 15 years ago, as the vinyl revival started to kick in and turntable sales began to pick up again. By this point, Rega was a much larger company and was able to leverage its growing reputation to engage with cutting-edge high-tech manufacturing subcontractors. Through these new relationships, they created a test bed turntable called the Naiad that would extend their design philosophies as far as was feasibly possible...

The Naiad's high price was the result of some of the design choices that had already been made, when scaling up for production wasn't even under consideration. Rega knew it wouldn't be too difficult to create a more production-ready version, into which they could distill most of what they had learned from building the Naiad. The result is the Naia, where with just a few simple changes, they have managed to undercut the Naiad's price by more than 70%, down to $12,995.

I think of Audio-Technica as the maker of some of the best high-value cartridges out there. From the ubiquitous AT3600L, which can be had for a little more than a Big Mac meal at McDonald's, to the popular OC9 moving coil series, A-T's cartridges have long been easy-to-recommend options that deliver great sound mounted on just about any turntable.

But occasionally, Audio-Technica likes to show off its technological chops by launching a cartridge that breaks new ground. Last year, they celebrated their 60th anniversary by stunning everyone with the AT-MC2022, which uses an outrageous integrated stylus and cantilever fashioned from a single piece of lab-grown diamond. In 2016, they flexed their capabilities with the AT-ART1000, which completely reconfigured how the elements of a moving coil cartridge are arranged, with spectacular results.

Now, eight years after the AT-ART1000 was launched, A-T has introduced the AT-ART1000x, which incorporates several small but important improvements.

It started one evening when I was killing time watching YouTube videos and stumbled across a 2017 talk given by Jonathan Carr, Lyra's brilliant cartridge designer (footnote 1). After discussing his design and Lyra's manufacturing processes for about 18 minutes, Carr opens the floor to questions. Someone asks which of the many cartridge setup parameters he feels is the most important. I was floored when the first thing Carr said was that "horizontal tracking error is not very important at all." What? I couldn't believe I was hearing this from the guy who writes owner's manuals with super-specific specifications, like tracking force measured to a 100th of a gram and loading recommendations with wide but oddly specific ranges like 97.6 to 806 ohms. Did he really believe that the tonearm geometry calculations of Löfgren, Stevenson, et al, weren't such a big deal?

For decades I have painstakingly used the best tools available to perfect these settings with every cartridge I install; now a guy whose opinion I respect deeply is saying it's not very important.

Ron Sutherland makes a strong case for being crowned the king of all phono preamps, though I expect he would blush at any such suggestion. In 1979, with degrees in physics and electronic engineering (where his final project involved designing and building a digital logic–controlled preamp), he teamed up with Gayle Sanders to found electrostatic speaker company MartinLogan. ("Martin" and "Logan" are Sanders' and Sutherland's middle names, respectively.) But after a few years, he found the increasingly corporate mindset at M-L a bit stifling, so he decided to go his own way. Ron wanted to build gear he thought was cool and fun while not being directed solely by its commercial potential. He joined up with his brother to start Sutherland Engineering, creating hi-fi equipment that piqued his own interest and hopefully that of a bunch of customers.

At first, Sutherland made a wide range of components, including preamps, power amps, and DACs, but gradually he focused more and more on phono preamps. Today that's the only thing he makes...

Last month, I talked a bit about some of the new gear being exhibited at AXPONA, America's big hi-fi show, held near Chicago. Well, every year, as soon as that show is over, it's time to get ready for the Big Kahuna of audio shows, High End Munich.

Admittedly, I have never attended the big shows in Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Warsaw, but it would be hard to imagine either one outdoing Munich. The Warsaw show calls itself the second biggest show in Europe, deferring, presumably, to the Munich show. Munich is so big that it even has a sideshow, HiFi Deluxe, just down the road. HiFi Deluxe caters to exhibitors who got shut out of the big show, which despite its hugeness is oversubscribed. It can all become a bit overwhelming.

The main Stereophile crew covering the Munich show—Ken Micallef and Jason Victor Serinus—did all the heavy-duty legwork, posting highlights here. I toured the halls to see what was new, collecting the best, most Spin Doctor–ish things for this report. Here's a smattering.

It has been more than a decade since 2012, when Lyra launched the original Atlas moving coil cartridge as the company's flagship, but in the intervening years, there have been a few updates. First, in 2016, Lyra introduced what they call the SL versions of the Atlas and also the Etna. These cartridges were designed to take advantage of a new crop of transimpedance phono preamps like the CH Precision P1 and the Sutherland Phono Loco, which boast exceptionally low noise levels but work best with cartridges that have very low impedance. Cutting the number of turns on each of the cartridge's two coils in half reduces the moving mass and inertia, allowing the stylus/cantilever assembly to respond more accurately to the tiny groove modulations. This results in improved tracking at the cost of a lower output level, which, thankfully, transimpedance phono preamps are well-equipped to handle.

Then in 2020, both Atlas and Etna versions were updated to new λ Lambda versions, with a redesigned suspension and damper system that Lyra says delivers enhancements in clarity and resolution.