Capsule Review: "Lungs" meets the Denon DL-103R

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CD, Grado or Denon - which gives her the breath of life?
Yes, we're sometimes late to the party, but we have listened to, and known of Florence and the Machine for awhile through the teens in the household.  And of course, they know if they suggest something on vinyl, it usually shows up and gets played.  So we have 2 of her albums on both CD and LP.  She's had one really big hit, "The Dog Days Are Over" and we admit, we love that song.

When we listened to the CD through the Ayre C-5xeMP, playing the hit "The Dog Days are Over" - the song seemed like it is ever so slightly compromised in some manner: sounding nearly perfect but lacking a bit of humanity.  You hear forceful percussion, a lilting mandolin, and her voice coming through but not as clearly and as richly as you think her voice should sound - it gives the impression of the voice as another instrument in the band, and trying to argue a point.  We wanted to have a second opinion on the LP to see if the Grado Reference Sonata1 would do what it always does:  bring out the music and humanity of a performance. When we played the LP with it, it sounded somewhat flat and opaque - the voice sounded okay, but the percussion and mandolin were muted, rolled off and mushy.  At the time, we shrugged our shoulders somewhat, and moved on.   After all, likely a jaded mastering engineer took the low bit rate song and pressed it into vinyl to sell to uncritical hipsters just thrilled to have it all on vinyl, right?

Boy were we wrong!
 
Enter the Denon, the Mighty-Mite of the Audiophile World



Enter the Denon DL-103R ...

We dropped the Denon needle on this record the other night and compared it to the CD.

The Denon captured the lilting highs and a measure of the thunderous percussion similar to the CD, but the sound was more "in balance" than the CD, and the dynamics slightly muted compared to digital.  But what happened that was extraordinary, is the vocals came through clearly, and with some real flesh on the bones, something the Ayre C-5xeMP, and Berkeley Audio DAC-2 couldn't manage.  The song had a plaintive humanity to it, as if she was saying the Dog Days were over, but wasn't completely sure that they really were.

By contrast, it was clear the Grado was never designed to handle these tracks, which sounded closed in, and rolled off by comparison.  The Grado usually kills anything that relies upon the mids, but struggles with the highs and lows when they get forceful. While we much prefer the Grado on Ella and Louis, as we said before, the Denon pulls far ahead during this complicated album.

The CD got things a bit more technically accurately, but lost a little humanity in the process.

Which is correct?  I suppose it is one of those "I like Vanilla, and you like Chocolate" moments.  But we do realize that the LP is much better than we thought, and how darn important a cartridge is to overall LP reproduction.

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