17dx

Go Nude for Even Better Sound

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining what the aim of this blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with higher fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

Nothing will bring you as much joy as when you manage, by whatever means, probably against all odds, to make significant audio progress.

The more progress you make, the more you will enjoy your favorite music. At least that’s what happened to me over the course of the last fifty years as I set about working on my system, room and a great deal more.

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

“NUDE” Your Dynavector KARAT 17DX Cartridge for EVEN BETTER Sound

More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.

And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.

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Cartridge Tweaking and Turntable Setup Advice

More Turntable Setup Advice

Playing so many records every day means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges much more often than most consumers would. They typically last us about three or four months.

This requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.

Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and know well.

For the longest time our favorite test discs for this purpose have been these three:

  1. Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular,
  2. Tea for the Tillerman, and
  3. Led Zeppelin II.

To be honest, I was the only guy on the listening panel using Bob and Ray. I have played that record at least 500 times, perhaps 1000, and would be lost without it.

Our listening guys — much younger and not nearly as interested in correctly reproducing The Song of the Volga Boatmen as I was — preferred numbers two and three, and of course those work fine too. In fact, when setting up our new studio, I came to realize Bob and Ray were not enough to get the room right, a subject I wrote about here.

We are in the process of making some lists (more lists! You can never have too many!) for records we’ve found to be good for testing, tweaking and tuning your system, your room and your front end setup, among other things. You may want to check them out.

These are the records that challenged me and helped me to achieve more progress in audio. If you are serious about improving your playback, these are some of the best records we know of to help get you to the next level.

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Our Playback System – And Why You Shouldn’t Care

Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress

Below you will find a list of most of the equipment we have been using over the last twenty years or so to carry out our Hot Stamper pressing evaluations, or “shootouts” as we like to call them.

Naturally the reality of the 80/20 Rule comes into play here — 80% (probably more like 90 or 95%, truth be told) of the sound is what you do with your audio system, 20% (or 10 or 5%) of the sound is the result of the components you own.

We like to say it’s not about the audio you have, it’s about the audio you do: how you set up your system, what you’ve done to treat your room, how good your electricity is and all the rest of it.

  • Our VPI Aries (original, not the latest model) with 
  • Super Platter (no longer made) and
  • TTWeights Carbon Fiber Platter (a big upgrade, no longer made).
  • VPI Synchronous Drive System (as of 2016 now sitting on a Townshend Seismic Sink).
  • Triplanar tonearm.
  • Dynavector 17dx.
  • Aurios (no longer made), which sit on a
  • Townshend Seismic Sink (another big upgrade).
  • EAR 324p phono stage
  • We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers. Even more now that they have much improved high frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.
  • Mix in extensive room treatments, aided inestimably by three pairs of Hallographs (as we like to say, there is practically no Hi-Fi without them), more than thirty years of experience and endless hours of experimentation and you have a system that can separate the winners from the losers like nobody’s business.
  • Exactly like nobody’s business, because nobody does it in this business but us. Having heard hundreds of systems over the years, it’s an open question as to whether anyone else could do what we do even if they tried.

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Letter of the Week – “…it is now a reference or demo if you wish, that lets me know how good my system really is.”

More of the Music of The B-52’s

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently: 

Hey Tom, 

Hey guys, before I talk about my very first Hot Stamper let me say this. I have been going to your site for well over two years and was very reluctant to spend the kind of money that you charge for a used record. Come on! Are you kidding??

But I was very intrigued by the description of your system. I had felt that the weakest part of my system may be the cartridge. So I sprung for the 17d3.

WOW! A first class improvement. So I thought “Well if these guys are right about the cartridge, maybe there is something about these used records. After all I can always send it back, right?”

So I ordered the B-52’s first album and played it. And played it. No No No, get up off your knees and stop begging. You can’t have it back. It’s MINE. Although I do not have this album in any format, it is now a reference or demo if you wish, that lets me know how good my system really is. It has also revealed to me that I have records that sound pretty darned good. It has also given me a lesson on critical listening.

I have been listening to music for over 55 years, and you are never too old to learn. Last week I received my new VPI with Disc Doctor package, and it seems to have been a wise addition. I have found a few treasures that have been lurking in my collection. And I ordered a Peter Gabriel today. I am a happy camper.

Kevin B.

Kevin,

Thanks for your letter. Now you have the ideal cartridge to play back our Hot Stampers pressings and hear just how phenomenally good they really sound.

Playback accuracy is at the heart of everything we do. We want to hear our records naked and unadorned. That’s what the 17dx does for us, and of course it can do the same for you.

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This Is the Heart of Our System’s Accuracy

Thoughts on Playback Accuracy

If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange, the one that so many moving coils have these days, you may not notice some tonality issues we discuss on the blog and in our Hot Stamper listings quite as easily as we do.

Our Dynavector 17Dx Karat is ruler flat and very unforgiving in this regard. It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in all but the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.

We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled Hi-Fi beats My-Fi. (If you are serious about audio this is a must read.)

Further Reading

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Turntable Tweaking Advice – Try This at Home, It Worked for Us

Advice on Making Audio Progress

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written around 2010 or so. Mapleshade stopped sending me catalogs not long after this commentary was published here on the blog, probably not because of anything I’d written.

More likely it was because I never bought anything from them. And why would I? They give out some good advice, sure, but it’s mixed in with a lot of audiophile nonsense of the purest kind. The audio world was drowning in it long before I got into the hobby in the early-70s, and let me be the first to admit that I have fallen for more than my share over the years (partly because I have been doing it for so long, if that’s any excuse).

If you want to know the truth, watching videos is not the way to learn about audio.

Reading blogs is not either.

The audiophile who wants to improve his playback quality has only one option, and that is to get his hands dirty, because doing audio is the only kind of audio that works. Everyone gives out plenty of advice, including us. Testing that advice and putting it what you learn from it into practice is what separates the men from the boys, or the good stereos from the bad ones, as the case may be.

The Mapleshade website has a piece of audio advice that caught the eye of one our customers, who sent me the excerpt below.  

Like most advice, especially audio advice, we find that some of it accords well with our own experience and some of it clearly does not. The relationship of good to bad is hard to determine without making a more careful study, but let’s just say that there is plenty of both and let that suffice.

That being the case, we thought it would be of service to our customers to break it down in more detail, separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

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