FORUM.

Cruisin' With The Hits ... and Bits

There's another way to get a very flexible and decent performing small table radio (with tape and/or CD capability). Make your own, using a 12-volt car stereo CD or tape receiver as the basis, in conjunction with small separate speakers (which you can now place for better stereo sound), and an inexpensive 12-volt power supply. If you shop around a bit, you can put it all together for less than $300 and solve most of the problems alluded to in your review of the CSW and Bose units. First of all, most such receivers often have excellent FM and AM performance, more than adequate "rms" power to drive a pair (or even four) small, relatively high-performance speakers, and the obvious built-in CD player (or Dolby cassette tape player). Some units even have a convenient line-level input for another source. Since these receivers are subject to frequent (probably annual) model changes, closeouts are always available from someone. In addition, the receiver plus power supply is a very small package. It does however take some effort to put together, mainly in wiring everything up to the receiver's main plug, which connects to the speakers and input power source.

Five or so years ago I put one together for my daughter in college; I still use it today on my desk. For this unit I used a Blaupunkt Lexington Dolby tape receiver ($140) which has a plug for an external source (here I connected a Panasonic SLS-170 portable CD player ($100)), a Radio Shack 12-volt power supply ($40), and a pair of close-out Radio Shack Optimus Pro LX4 speakers (4" Kevlar "woofers" and Linaeum tweeters) for another $100. Total cost: $380, including tape and CD capability. You also need a small antenna ($7 or $8 at Radio Shack). The sound is quite decent, but of course has no real bass, you can't record on tape, and the unit has no handheld remote. But, it has proved quite rugged, easily withstanding five years of college abuse; functional, but certainly not gorgeous.

In closing, just one further comment. The latest issue of your magazine is now bigger than ever (and also a heck of a lot prettier). Contemporaneously, while browsing at Barnes and Noble last weekend, I picked up a copy of Stereophile and happened to read the editor's elaborate and somewhat convoluted menu of excuses given to a reader for their magazine's rapidly shrinking size (which included among other things the well-known collapse of the Thai, Malaysian, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Indonesian economies in 1998). He also cited the demise or consolidation of several competing publications. Now I used to subscribe to Stereophile in the '70s and '80s, when they still had some focus on value, which of course they have long since abandoned. Stereophile's editor never mentioned the possibility of a loss of focus on the real customer market. Perhaps the true depth of the elite market for $8,000 tube amplifiers and $7,500 DACs is a lot less than imagined over there in Santa Fe. In any case, you folks seem to be doing something right, so keep it up.

Irwin L. Parmet
via e-mail

Your letter was a kick! By the way, our own Tom Nousaine is so enamored of the jammin' sounds he gets in his Corvette that he has built a similar rig for his own home system. Thanks for the kind words.

Groove Thang

I usually find your magazine enjoyable and informative to read, with a more down-to-earth point of view than most other domestic audio magazines. But in the last three issues, I've noticed a decided bias against the vinyl format, supported by blatant misinformation.

First, all the problems Messrs. East, Cierniak, and Lyle encounter with their vinyl playback systems -- such as truncated bandwidth, distortion of high-level passages and on inner grooves -- scream of improper setup and/or mismatched components and are NOT conditions endemic to the format. Even with my first turntable, a cheap, plastic Japanese model with a throwaway cartridge, I never encountered ANY of the problems plaguing your staff with their LP systems. Concerning noisy LPs; sure, lousy quality vinyl is irredeemable, but much old and most new vinyl is quiet and can stay quiet with only a modicum of effort. But let's face it, LP playback demands manual dexterity, a mechanical inclination, patience and fastidiousness; which is why the format is not suited for most people. CDs exist for the rest. That's not elitist; it's simply a fact. Most people shouldn't be driving cars, either. Unfortunately, buses haven't caught on like CDs.

First I'd like to suggest possible problems with your LP playback systems that can lead to the conditions described.

1.) Incompatible cartridge and tonearm (concerning cartridge compliance and tonearm effective mass, and cartridge depth vs. tonearm height adjustability)

2.) Misaligned cartridge (overhang, azimuth, zenith, vertical tracking angle)

3.) Unleveled turntable (as determined on the platter)

4.) Improper anti-skate adjustment

5.) Inadequate turntable isolation (acoustic feedback)

Additionally, these electrical problems may exist:

1.) MM cartridge-preamp incompatibility (preamp overload during high-level passages, creating distortion and jumbling the sound)

2.) MM cartridge-cabling incompatibility (excess cable capacitance will act like a low-pass filter, rolling off high frequencies)

3.) MC cartridge-preamp incompatibility (too low an impedance loading will likewise roll off high-frequencies, too high an impedance and frequency response errors occur).

Next, I'd like to address the myths foisted on your readership concerning LP playback.

1.) Truncated bandwidth (rolled-off lows and highs). I doubt if any claim against LPs could be more wrong. LPs with TWICE the bandwidth of CDs were being stamped out 25 years ago (under the Quad "CD-4" format). Most LPs today are cut straight from the master tape. Comparisons with their CD counterparts (on a properly set-up LP system!) will easily demonstrate that fact. King Records touts their half-speed record cutting system which has a bandwidth of from 10 Hz to 45 kHz. It's CD that's playing catch-up with LPs, with the new "SACD" and DVD-A specifications. True, in days of yore, LPs were rolled off and compressed for AM reproduction. But that's history. On the vinyl hardware playback side, even cheap Grado cartridges have bandwidths out to 60 kHz. So if your LP system is lacking high- or low-frequency extension, don't blame the format. Find out what's wrong with your system.

2.) "The nearly instantaneous sound degradation" upon the first tracing of the needle in the groove. Try taking the penny off the headshell! Seriously, that's an absurd caricature, like saying that the instant you start a new car, those pistons scraping up and down in the cylinder, metal-on-metal, causes instant power degradation. Like a piston is designed to reciprocate in a cylinder, hundreds of millions of times over 100,000 miles, a stylus is designed to RIDE (not SCRAPE) in a vinyl groove, which itself is endowed with lubricants to reduce friction. Modern stylus shapes and low vertical tracking forces have almost banished wear (the Shure V15VxMR is a case-in-point). Kept clean, a record will outlast numerous styli without appreciable wear and loss of fidelity. To illustrate the point, I have my very first album -- The Bee Gees' First from 1967 -- which survived hundreds of plays on my parents' Magnavox console with its notorious ceramic cartridge.

3.) The inevitability of record noise. Lousy vinyl is noisy, and without remedy. That's what paved the way for CDs. But quality virgin vinyl can be completely without noise (ticks and pops) and can readily stay that way without great effort. First, remember to vacuum and dust the listening room at east once a year. Second, don't use an LP as a pizza serving tray, or a door mat to scrape your work boots on. Don't manhandle an LP after gorging on sticky chocolate. Seriously, some people are not very fastidious or tidy. If so, admit it and stick with cassettes or CDs. Otherwise, a machine wash (that means a record cleaner!), a once-only anti-static treatment, and the only routine cleaning need be a quick sweep with a dry brush, and a periodic stylus cleaning. And a quiet LP will STAY quiet. I have a collection of records to prove it.

A person's choice of CD as their audio format is perfectly valid, as is the LP. And I can quote as many "experts" who will support LP playback as others can find supporting CD playback. But don't unfairly characterize the LP simply because of a personal incompatibility with the format and a poorly set up system. If you want to hear what the venerable LP format is capable of, I'll gladly demonstrate how, even on a modest, sensible system, an LP can really impress with an extended, dynamic, realistic sound.

Michael T. Klewin
Lawrenceyille, NJ

Gee, I thought we beat this horse to death last issue, but what the heck, let's saddle up and giddy up one more time ...

First, let me say that I certainly have no hostility toward the LP format. I played records for a long time. I have owned some of the finest MC cartridges, an unbelievably fine head amp (a Sony HA-55 with its fantastic paralleled-matched-pair-FET front end, modified and dialed in by electonics whiz Mark McKenzie) and so on and so forth. I resisted CD playback for a time, then switched over and never looked back. But I have no quarrel with the format. It can give great musical pleasure. But allow me just a couple of quick general points before I get down to the specifics of your letter.

First, given a master tape, analog or digital, which is more likely to make a more accurate copy for storage and playback? My money is on the CD, and I believe most engineers worth their salt would agree with me. Now, note that I did not say, "Which will give its listeners more listening pleasure?" That is a different question. The dynamic interchannel phase errors endemic to most cartridges (our former contributor Dr. Richard Greiner did extensive research into this phenomenon a couple of decades ago) contribute to a sense of "airiness" and "soundstage" that can be very pleasant.

Second, whether we like it or not, we must admit that the LP format is basically dead, musically speaking. Yes, there is a large body of music on vinyl, much of which will never be on CD. However, just to take a couple of quick examples, there are performances such as Georg Tintner's Bruckner cycle on Naxos and Pierre Boulez's Mahler cycle on DG that are available only on CD.

On to specific issues. First, as I said above, we are not hostile toward the LP format. It is not something we spend much time on, because we are primarily interested in speakers and recordings, but we still cover cartridges and turntables from time to time. Yes, Joe Cierniak is capable of some inflammatory rhetoric, but that's Joe. Even he has a respect for the LP medium. As far as Tom Lyle, my goodness -- Tom is a vinyl fanatic, and has one of the most meticulously cared-for vinyl playback systems going! No doubt he is grievously wounded by your remarks, but he is a big boy, and will get over it. As far as Kevin East, Kevin is a music lover. He is not a vinyl fanatic, but he has lots of vinyl, and he plays it from time to time. But Kevin likes to keep up with what's new in music, and as I pointed out above, that pretty well restricts him to CD.

As far as the bandwidth available from LP, it is hard to make generalizations. And you must recall that LPs are not cut with a flat-bandwidth signal. Bass frequencies are blended toward mono and rolled off about 20 dB at 20 Hz), while high frequencies are boosted (about 20 dB at 20 kHz). Something that should be noted here is that the high frequency boost cannot be continued forever, so in most cutterhead systems, the boost is cut off at around 50 kHz. Cutterheads are driven by large, powerful amplifiers that are not designed in the same way that the typical "audiophile" amplifier is designed. (But that's another story -- just keep this in mind the next time somebody says that only an esoteric, low-power amp can possibly sound any good. If that's true, then LPs would sound pretty bad!) At any rate, the claim that a cutterhead system is capable of frequency response of 10 Hz-45 kHz is nothing extraordinary. If it did not have such a response, in fact, it would not meet established RIAA standards. The real question is how well the signal coming from the cartridge and then equalized and amplified by the phono preamplifier matches what is on the master tape. I doubt that you'll find much legitimate signal at 20 kHz. And I'll bet that much of what you find at higher frequencies is pretty bollixed up in terms of phase, especially when you look at phase differences between channels, compared to the output from the original tape recorder.

As far as your point about "groove scraping," you are correct. The physics of the stylus/vinyl interface are different than "common sense" might lead us to believe, and in most cases, very little, if any, deterioration takes place as the stylus moves through the groove.

Regarding the inevitability of record noise, I believe it is pretty clear that the vast majority of LPs are more noisy than the vast majority of CDs. Whether that noise detracts from aesthetic enjoyment is a separate issue. One of the fundamental flaws in an analog system is that any changes in the medium produce by necessity a change in the output. If you cut a radial scratch in an LP, you are going to hear it. If you cut a radial scratch in a CD, the output signal will be unaffected unless the scratch is large enough to overwhelm the error concealment/correction ability of your CD player. But again, none of this means that you cannot derive exquisite sonic and musical pleasure from an LP. Furthermore, nothing I have said derives from any "hostility" I might have toward the LP format -- and what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Finally, I must say I got a kick out of your remark about cars and drivers. I look forward to the day when you and I are pretty much the only two guys driving cars (let's forget this beat-up old horse we've been riding for the past few paragraphs), and we can scoot around all those clunky buses. Zoom on!