A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
The Townshend Seismic Platform: ESSENTIAL in ANALOG Playback
Robert mentions that his original commentary for the Seismic Platform has been lost. Here is what’s left of it.
I shared my story of starting out with the ‘bladder” version of the sink (now called a platform) back in the early 2000s, noting what a pain it was and how the amount of air in each of the three bladders changed the sound of the turntable.
Fortunately, those days are gone. It is now set and forget (although, like everything else in audio, you need to tweak it a bit to get the most benefit from it). You can contact Townshend for pricing and the cost of shipping direct to you, no middleman (that used to be us!) involved. We cannot recommend any piece of audio gear more highly.
(Please note that we do not make a dime from this product. We want you to buy them — yes, ideally you’re going to need more than one — so that your stereo can show you just how much better our vintage vinyl pressings are when directly compared to any and all others.)
Some background:
A few years back I discovered something wonderful about the Seismic Sink I was using under my turntable to control vibration. In our experience, vibration control is one of the most important revolutionary advancements in audio of the last twenty years or so. This commentary should help to give your tweaking efforts more context.
I refer the readers who are wondering why Robert and I keep banging on about classical music to Robert’s review written for the MoFi of Blue. He poses the question every audiophile should be asking about every pressing of Blue they own or plan to own, to wit:
BLUE: What’s the RIGHT SOUND For Joni Mitchell’s CLASSIC?
An excerpt:
It took a while for Robert to hear what was wrong with it, and he needed a vintage pressing to show him the qualities that were missing or degraded on the new pressing.
Do the folks who buy these newly remastered pressings know what Joni’s voice — let along her dulcimer — really sounds like?
How exactly would they come by that information?
Obviously, they have no way to know, so the record that gets her voice right is the record that gets her voice to sound the way the listener would like it to sound, right, wrong, or in-between.
This explains something that I have been wrestling with for years, namely, how is this company still in business?
Does the typical analog-loving audiophile have a system as good as Robert’s? Obviously not.
If he is a fan of the sound of Mobile Fidelity’s modern masterings, he must have one that lets, or makes, a record like Blue sound good on his system.
Can we imagine what that system generally sounds like?
I sure can’t, and I don’t think Robert can either.
This is why we cannot understand the appeal of these pressings. We have no way to hear how they interface with the systems used to play them.
Our criticisms mean nothing to the owners of these systems.
The dulcimer sounds great! You don’t know what are you talking about!
And we don’t. We really don’t.
We cannot know what the dulcimer on “Carey” sounds like on one of these systems.
The one thing that Robert and I would tell you is that when your system starts to do a better job of reproducing any pressing of the album, the difference in the sound of the dulcimer from one pressing to another will become more recognizable. Some dulcimers will sound better and some will sound more “funny.”
The “funny” sounding ones will tend to be found on the modern pressings.
The vintage pressings may not be all that great, but “funny” sounding? Not likely. Not on Blue anyway.
Like Robert says, the best pressings will reveal themselves to sound more like records from the early-70s tend to sound.
And if your system can make that clear to you, that will turn out to be, in so many ways, the surest sign of audio progress.
By the way, Robert Brook can get your front end tuned up and working right. We highly recommend his new service. It might just put you on the path to achieving the next level in audio. (You will definitely struggle to get there with a table, arm and cartridge that aren’t set up with a high degree of precision by a person who knows what they are doing, and Robert has been doing this work for years now.)