Brilliant Corners

In subsequent listening sessions, what stayed with me most was the remarkable coherence the EM/IA brought to my system. While there was a slight reduction in the first kind of force—sheer grunt and propulsion—there was a notable increase in the second: Music sounded more natural, present, and intentional, less like a collection of sounds and more like a real performance. And the EM/IA more consistently drew my attention to the music rather than the sound, always a wonderful development. It turns out that getting this kind of genuinely inspiring performance out of the EM/IA is dependent on your overall system gain. The relatively high gain of the Manley Mahis—around 32dB—made it possible to operate the EM/IA autoformer in its sweet spot. In my room, the optimal volume level, which appears on the readout, was around 21 (footnote 3).

But when I replaced the Mahis with the Ampsandsound Red October, a 300B SET amp with a single 12AX7 input/driver tube and much lower gain, I had to set the autoformer to 40 to achieve the same volume. With the autoformer driving the 300B amp, I found myself wanting more drive. Without it, the system lacked excitement and punch, and I preferred listening to the Red October with the PrimaLuna.

If you're interested in the EM/IA, it's important to consider the rest of your system. Slagle told me that if you're setting loudness near the top of the autoformer's range, you won't be getting the best out of it and will want to add gain. An audition is probably a good idea; luckily EM/IA offers a 14-day trial.

In case you're wondering, I did listen to the silver version. What I heard was sound that was even more detailed and clear, without any of the whitish, bleached cast that some silver components can impart. Recordings sounded bigger than through its copper sibling and created images that were even more uncannily free of the speakers. Most memorably, music became eerily holographic, as though made of light. Slagle likens this silver effect to being on LSD. I think he's joking, but the comparison has a dose of truth.

Though the silver EM/IA was undoubtedly impressive, I kept returning to the copper version. I found that the silver unit drew my attention to the leading edge of notes more than I wanted, and with certain interconnects the top end became, as the kids used to say, a bit extra.

Whichever version you prefer, the EM/IA Remote Autoformer is a world-beating preamplifier. In a system with enough gain, it can offer astonishing performance, on par with the best preamplifiers I've heard at any price. And it's a mature, convenient, well-finished product that throws in a superbly executed balance control, at prices that are more than fair. Nice work, Dave and Jeff.

Listening with Jerome Sabbagh
Sometimes a thing we didn't know we wanted proves unforgettable. For me, one of those moments happened this winter when saxophonist and composer Jerome Sabbagh dropped by for dinner and some listening.

Sabbagh is a longtime fixture on New York's jazz scene and no stranger to this magazine. He's been profiled by Ken Micallef, and his most recent album, Vintage, was chosen as a Recording of the Month and written about by Jim Austin. Not surprisingly, Sabbagh is himself an audiophile and makes records with almost as much care for their sound as for the music.

About that music: Sabbagh is something of an outlier in contemporary jazz. Many players today prioritize technical virtuosity and reaching beyond the stylistic boundaries of jazz. The first ambition is as old as the music itself. The second speaks to jazz's current predicament as an outmoded genre that, more than ever, depends on detours into other forms of music—particularly funk, hip hop, and soul—to achieve broader popularity. Some of these fusions have been downright thrilling, and it isn't difficult to empathize with the artists' desire to reach a larger audience.

Sabbagh has taken a different route. On Vintage and his upcoming record, Heart, he plays in a style that might have been heard a half-century ago. His improvising is reminiscent of Lester Young, Stan Getz, and Ben Webster. I don't mean to suggest that his music is coyly derivative or closed off to modernity, only that he keeps his light-toned, lyrical playing planted squarely in the idioms of cool jazz and hard bop and never tries to cover up a lack of ideas with flurries of needless notes.

The reason for his visit was to listen to Heart, scheduled to be released by his new label, Analog Tone Factory, this summer. For Sabbagh, the album represents the culmination of a longtime dream to record with Al Foster, the octogenarian drummer best known for playing with Miles Davis on 1970s fusion milestones like Agharta and Pangaea. The other member of the trio is the young bassist Joe Martin, a frequent collaborator of Sabbagh's who has recorded with everyone from Brad Mehldau to Donald Fagen.

The process of recording Heart testifies to Sabbagh's obsessiveness about sound and his remarkable interest in recording. The session was cut in June 2022 at Studio C at the renowned Power Station in New York, a venue he chose for its intimate sound and acoustics. Sabbagh believes that a group playing together in one room is liable to make better music, and the recording was made live to two-track, with no edits or overdubs. Grammy-winning engineer James Farber used mostly vintage condenser and ribbon microphones, capturing the session simultaneously on Studer A820 and modified Ampex 351 tape recorders, as well as via an Avid HDXII/Pro Tools digital interface. The tape recorders ran ½" tape at 30ips. The tapes from the Ampex were mastered by Bernie Grundman on an all-tube mastering chain. As was the case with Vintage, the vinyl versions are set to be pressed at Gotta Groove in Cleveland. If this paragraph is making your eyes glaze over, it's enough to know that very few recordings go to such extraordinary lengths to achieve their sound.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the superb-sounding Vintage, both the playing and sound on Heart strike me as being on a higher level. Sabbagh sounds more driven and inspired, while Foster drums with boundless inventiveness and charm. And the sound is closer-miked, richer, and even more transparent.

Sabbagh is a fellow wine dork, and before sitting in front of the La Scalas to listen, we got pretty deep into an old Cabernet Franc that smelled the way a shirt smells after a campfire. He wanted to take me inside his recording process, and we began by comparing digital files made from the Avid ADC, the Studer tape, the Ampex tape, and the mastered tape from Grundman.

The Avid file of the first track from Heart, Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss," proved difficult to enjoy. The playing sounded oddly disjointed, as though the musicians weren't listening to each other; its overriding feeling was confusion. "Pretty terrible," Sabbagh muttered, grimacing. The Studer file was a vast improvement: The music swung and danced, and the recorder's Swiss solid state electronics created a transparent, pacey sound. The Ampex file sounded richer and more colorful, though possibly not quite as agile and musically insightful. Finally, the file made from the mastered tape was the best yet, combining the agility and clarity of the Studer and the lovely tone of the Ampex. The obvious differences between these four digital files of the same performance proved instructive.

Sabbagh and I had planned to listen to the analog tapes on his Ampex 351 recorder, but the machine was in the shop. So instead, we played Bernie Grundman's lacquer of Heart, which Sabbagh was kind enough to bring with him. The sonic experience was so intense that at times I found it hard to believe that I was listening to the same recording. The instrumental timbres, dynamic expression, spatial depth, and overall realism of the lacquer were utterly riveting, among the best recordings I've heard in my home. (If you're curious about the sonic differences between a lacquer and a record, you're not alone. Fortunately, Sabbagh also brought a lacquer of Vintage, which we later compared to a mint vinyl copy. I'm sorry to report that the differences were obvious and large, on the order of listening through a new, much better amplifier.)

Could the sound get any better? Well, after we heard the lacquer, Sabbagh took out his Conn New Wonder II tenor saxophone from 1927, the one we had just listened to him play, and stood between the speakers. He proceeded to play George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me," the last track on Heart. I never imagined that I'd hear a musician on a record only to have him play for me moments later, but there it was. I may have cried a little.

Of course Sabbagh's live performance was completely, phenomenologically different from the recorded versions. Of course it sounded incomparably more real. Yet in another sense it was reassuring, because the recorded version wasn't terribly "worse" than live. In fact, in some ways, the recording was more intimate and attractive, if not nearly as detailed or natural. I'm still unpacking what I learned. In the meantime, thank you, Jerome, for an inspiring night. I won't forget it anytime soon.

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Footnote 3: That's –33dB from the Slagleformer, so Alex's very sensitive Klipsch speakers were seeing a signal smaller than that emerging from the phono preamplifier.—Jim Austin