Well, I don’t know if anyone will find this useful, but I hope so! A few of us, Jay, Rick and Adam (me), got together on Sunday in sunny Pasadena, CA and had a little informal vintage turntable shootout. Here’s the lineup:
Preamp: AVA Fet Valve CF
Amps: AVA 400R and Ultravalve
Speakers: Yamaha NS 1000
Interconnects from phono pre to preamp: Liberty Cable Z500
Interconnects from preamp to amp: Kimber Kable Silver Streak.
Speaker cables: Liberty Cables
Morrow Audio SP5 reference
Nordost Tyr
Phono preamps: Avid Pulsus, Nova Phonomena and EAR 834P w/vol. control
Turntables: Phase Linear 8000 Series 2, with Modified Denon 103R with Sound Smith
retip ruby cantilever/Optimized Contour Nude Contact Line Diamond and
Audiosilente carbon fiber body.
Micro-Seiki B21, with a Graham Robin Tonearm, AT-OC09ML/II cartdridge,
Furutech AG-12 phono cable
JVC QL-Y5F modified with mass loading of the plinth and re-enforced base,
AT-OC09ML/II cartdridge
JVC QL-Y66F, no mods (yet), Denon SL-D1 cartridge
Empire 598 Series III, Empire 2000e/iii cartridge
We limited our listening to just a few cuts:
“Easy Money” from Rickie Lee Jones “Self-Titled” album, Mobile Fidelity @ 45 RPM and the original pressing @ 33 1/3 RPM
“Goldrush” and “Oh Yeah” from Yello “One Second”
“I Will Find You There (Complete performance version)” Michael Ruff “Speaking in Melodies”, Sheffield Labs
The Michael Ruff cut was pretty much our reference cut that we played on everything and all combinations. I finally had to ask the guys not to play it any more because I didn’t want to start hating that track!
The original idea was to compare Jay’s JVC Y5F with the OC09 cart and my Micro-Seiki with the same cart to see how the very different turntables/tonarms changed the sound. The JVC is a direct drive with the Q-damped tonearm, while the Micro-Seiki is a simple belt drive. Also, Jay added an extra 15 pounds or so of plastic clay to the plinth, so it was much more substantial. The best I could do with my Micro-Seiki was put it on some Stillpoint cones. It’s clear it needs the plastic clay treatment badly.
We started with the Avid phono pre and the Ultravalve. With both tables, we could immediately pick up on the cartridge’s signature sound, detailed, very lively, a little tilted up in the mid highs (1-3K maybe?) and slight dip in the bass (maybe 60-70Hz?), though the deep bass was there.
I’m probably biased, but I preferred the sound coming from the Micro-Seiki. It had a little more body while the JVC was slightly lean. I think Jay agreed… I’m sure he’ll comment below
… They both sounded quite good though.
Next we put the EAR phone preamp into the system and the sound became a little peaky at certain frequencies and uneven. The EAR has only one adjustment button, MM or MC and I suspect it’s not a good match for the OC09 cart. It sounds smoother in the MM setting, but you have to crank the volume to almost 100% on the phono pre AND the Preamp. I felt like I had to strain to hear the quiet passages while the loud sections were too much. I think that may have been because the system noise was just too high and overwhelmed the quiet passages.
Next we tried the other JVC turntable. The QL-Y66F is a beautiful table. The platter is oversized and gives it a museum quality look. Lots of electronics on this baby. It has the Q-dampened tonearm and if I understood correctly, the platter “floats” on a magnetic field? Anyway, Jay just got it, so he hasn’t packed the plinth yet and I think that’s what we noticed right away. There was less focus to the sound and it sounded like Rickie Lee was slurring her S’s like crazy. Well, ok, she DOES slur her S’s… but it was even more pronounced than normal. Over all the sound was not quite as detailed, but very listenable. Smooth with body would be a good description. We decided to switch from the Ultravalve tube amp to the 400R Hybrid amp to see if the solid state would be an improvement, and it was. Things sharpened up, but I think we agreed the previous two turntables sounded better. We briefly tried the EAR with the Hybrid amp and that was the worst combo, more peaky, more brittle. Back to the Avid and Ultravalve…
Up next was the Phase Linear with this totally tricked out cart. When Jay told me it was a Ruby stylus I thought, OK, sounds cool, but the damn thing is RED. I’m still new to serious record playing, so I’ve never seen this stuff before and it was very impressive. We put on Michael Ruff and the improvement was immediately obvious. Smoother, more detailed, balanced. The timbre was multi-layered and complex. That was the winning table by some margin.
There was one anomaly that we couldn’t explain though. During one chorus of “I Will Find You There” there’s a female backup singer coming into the soundstage about ¼ of the way from the far left towards the center. It played this way on all the turntables and at my home and from my CD as well at home. But the Phase Linear setup jammed her right into the left speaker. It was like she was stuffed inside the speaker cabinet. It was startling and seemed wrong. The overall soundstage was a little narrower with the Phase Linear as well. Does that mean this turntable is this just more accurate? Less crosstalk maybe? I don’t think so, because there were other instruments that were in only the left or right channel and they stayed in place on all the turntables. It was just this one female vocal. Weird.
We briefly played the Empire turntable through the Nova Phonomena phono preamp. This is the coolest looking table, I want it just to put on display. It had a very pleasant, but colored sound. It wasn’t audiophile grade, but I could listen to it happily.
Rick brought over some Nordost Tyr speaker cables and we decided to compare them to the Liberty and Morrow SP5 cables. We all expected the Nordost to be the best and they were significantly better than the Liberty cables. So we set the Liberty’s aside and compared just the Morrows and the Nordost. After Jay switched them 3 or 4 times as we kept our eyes closed, Rick and I thought we each had a very slight preference. I preferred the Morrows and he preferred the Nordost. But both of us were very unsure if that was our imaginations or not, it was so close. That’s saying a lot for the Morrows, I think they list for less than 1/3 the price. That was a nice surprise.
It was a fun afternoon. I’m sure I missed some stuff, so Jay, please add to this. When I got home I read up a little on the 834p and tube rolling. I swapped out the V3 12AX7 for an old Sylvania 5751. It made for even less gain in the MM position, but it made the MC setting smoother and very listenable. A few other problems sprouted up, but I won’t go into that here, except to say, I’ve heard that the strength of the 834p is the design, not the components. But there are mods that can be done that improve it significantly, mainly by improving the components. Any opinions on that?
