Revolutionary Changes in Audio – What Works for Us Can Work for You

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

This listing, like the stereo itself (mine and yours), is a work in progress. It used to be on our website. Now it resides here on the blog.

When I first got started in audio in the early- to mid-70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:

  • Stand-alone phono stages.
  • Modern cabling and power cords.
  • Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
  • Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
  • Carbon fiber mats for turntable platters.
  • Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
  • Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.
  • And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.

Our reason for having this kind of commentary on a site ostensibly devoted to the selling of records is simple: the better your stereo sounds, the better our records sound, and, more importantly, the bigger the difference between our records and the copies you already own. That includes LPs recommended by “audiophile” record dealers, which tend to be on Heavy Vinyl, at 45 RPM, Half-Speed mastered or Japanese pressed.

We have no interest in any of them. Why?

On our system they rarely sound better than second-rate.

We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers, even more now that they have much improved high-frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.

Our preamp and amp are vintage and low power; the Focus can play quite loudly with the thirty or so watts our amp puts out. We are big fans of low power (but not single ended) and are not the least bit happy with the current trend toward high-power amps, whether tube or transistor. (This trend started in the early ‘0s with the Phase Linear 400 amp and has only gotten more out of hand with each passing year.)

We tried higher power amps to do the shootouts for Nirvana, AC/DC and their ilk but gave up fairly quickly. Using those amps involves major trade-offs; trade-offs whose costs rarely exceed their benefits. With more power comes less Tubey Magic, sweetness, transparency, three-dimensionality and that wonderful relaxed quality which gives the music its flow and sense of ease.

High power amps do none of these things well, but most speakers today are terribly inefficient and require their use, a choice most audiophiles do not even know they are making when they buy them. I made that mistake myself many years ago. Live and learn.

Most of our wiring — interconnect, phono and power cord — is custom.

Having said that, this commentary is all about why you shouldn’t care a whit about the equipment we use. 

Ch-Ch-Changes at Better Records

Over the course of the last two decades things have changed dramatically for the better.

We’ve come up with a number of much more sophisticated and advanced cleaning techniques.

The ruler-flat, super-clean and clear Dynavector 17d replaced the more forgiving, less accurate 20x.

The EAR 324p we acquired at the beginning of 2007 was a BIG step up over the 834p in terms of resolution and freedom from distortion / coloration.

And the third pair of Hallographs had much the same effect, taking out the room distortions that compromise transparency and three-dimensionality.

With the implementation of a number of other seemingly insignificant tweaks, each of which made a subtle but recognizable improvement, the cumulative effect of all of the above was now clearly making a difference. The combination of so many improvements resulted in sound that was dramatically better in every way.

Reaching Back to 2004

These comments from the listing for Tea for the Tillerman from way back in 2004 discuss upgrades to your front end.

Hard Headed Woman is a song that has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. If you’ve been making regular upgrades to your equipment and taking advantage of all the new technologies available at the front end, such as:

vibration control, better arms, better cartridges, better phono stages, better motors, Synchronous Drive Systems, better power cords, better power conditioning, better platters,

to name just a few, you are no doubt able to reproduce this song much better than you were in the old days. I used to think that Cat’s voice got hard and harsh when he got loud on the passage that starts with “I know…many fine feathered friends…”.

Now he gets even louder, the drums are much more powerful, and yet he still sounds like a real person, not an overdriven recording.

The Vinyl Stone Age

Modern front ends, properly tweaked and set up, can handle the kind of energy found on this song in a way that wasn’t possible before. There have been a number of revolutions in the area of LP playback, not the least of which is the Prelude Record Cleaning System we tout so obsessively, all of which have allowed us to reproduce familiar records in a startlingly realistic way never before possible.

Further Reading


As far as we know.

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