Stand and Rack Reviews

"None of the amps I build are better than the others," Justin Weber of Ampsandsound told me not long after we met. "They are just different." I may have smirked inwardly. According to his company's website, Weber makes no fewer than 23 amplifier models, ranging from the $2700 Kenzie OG to the $38,000 Arch Monos. Are they really all equally good?, I wondered.

Does everything produce an improvement?"

My skeptical visitor, to whom I'd just pointed out some of the acoustic treatments and other accessories in my listening room, wasn't trying to push my buttons. He just wanted my opinion.

"No," I said. "Some things make the sound worse—way worse—but after all these years, I'm convinced that just about everything that can be done to a room or a system produces an audible difference, for better or worse."

(Photo by Mary Kent)

Of late, Stereophile has written a lot about vibration-isolating footers under loudspeakers. The idea of isolating loudspeaker vibrations from floors is controversial. Many (perhaps most) designers believe that dynamic loudspeakers in particular—those with significant moving mass in their cones—should be rigidly connected to the floor as is typically done with spikes. A rigid connection of the speaker to the floor reduces the Newton-1 reactive motion of the cabinet in response to the motion of the cones, heavy woofers in particular. Cabinet motion could be expected to smear the loudspeaker's sound.

In the early 1960s, young people who were anxious see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show had to first sit through a seeming eternity of bad comedians, bad puppet shows, and acrobats spinning dinner plates to the tune of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance. So it is here: Before I can get to the Miyajima Saboten L phono cartridge, I have to report on something I left out of my April 2018 column, which was devoted to Zu Audio's modification of the classic Denon DL-103 cartridge. And since this is information I've been holding on to for almost a year, I suppose I also left it out of my August 2017 column, which was devoted to the MusiKraft Audio's own modification of the Denon DL-103.

You can blame Casey McKee for this one. I found myself sitting next to Casey, who works at Brooklyn high-end dealer Innovative Audio (footnote 1), in the Phoenix rain last March, watching the first Formula One Grand Prix of the 1990 season. A month later, in New York for the High End Hi-Fi Show, I therefore thought it appropriate to visit Innovative and say "Hi." Audio pleasantries over, Casey enthused about this new Italian turntable stand he was setting up as I walked into the store, the oddly named ArchiDee.

The subject comes up every now and then: Audio reviewers don't write nearly enough negative reviews. One old attention-seeker on Audio Asylum went so far as to characterize Stereophile and our would-be competitors as "happy face" magazines—a joke in which he seemed to take tremendous pride—simply because we hand out a lot of As and Bs. By that logic, assuming that a certain percentage of underachievers is inevitable in any population, our schools aren't handing out nearly enough Fs. (I have a suggestion for where they can begin.)

About once a week, I hear about some new audio accessory heralded by breathless claims of stunning performance gains that "you've got to hear for yourself." Most of these I ignore, and of those I do consider, nearly all wither when subjected to logical engineering analysis. Every so often, however, one of these wonder widgets finds its way into my system.