If you have any interest in this industry at all you would be well aware that last Saturday was Record Store Day – a universal celebration of music on vinyl. While our selection of vinyl is limited (but of a very high quality) we took the opportunity on Saturday to re-visit just how good vinyl can sound.
We were privileged to have Mark Döhmann here for the day, along with Brad Serhan from Brigadiers Audio and Les Davis of Les Davis Audio.
Mark is universally regarded as one of the world’s authorities on turntables, and brought along with him one of his creations – the Dohmann Helix 2 turntable – which with the Schroder tonearm and Ortofon Winfield cartridge used on the day sells for approx. $50,000.
This was connected to the new Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista Phono pre-amp, the Krell Illusion 2 pre-ampand a pair of Krell 575 mono-block power amplifiers. The speakers were the One Audio BA-2 speakers designed by Brad, with tweaking handled by Les Davis.
Mark, Brad and Les spent a number of hours here on Friday setting up this system, I, and a number of our staff, was fortunate to be part of the process. Yet again it highlighted how important correct set-up is to achieve the best from any system. The end result was extremely impressive. Despite their relatively compact size the BA-2’s absolutely nailed everything that was thrown at them.
Just as impressive was the range of music that was being played. Any of you that have attended a hi-fi show will be familiar with the routine – almost every company will be demonstrating their system with similar style of music – most of it small ensembles, female voice, piano, guitar – you get the idea.
The reason behind this is that the more complex the piece of music the harder it is for the system to correctly define the supple nuances of the recording. Not with this system – Mark played everything from large orchestral pieces, to rock standards (Hendrix, Zeppelin), European Electronica, and everything in-between. Irrespective of how complicated the musical piece this system had the ability to pull the music apart and replay every note with its own space. This is a very rare achievement – one that should be experienced.
We still have the system set up for the next week or so. If you have the opportunity drop in and have a listen to what a good quality, well set-up vinyl based system should sound like.
You will be impressed.
