Putting Curtains in the Man-Cave

It used to be that every single receiver or preamp had a built in phonostage.  The way it used to work is that you would by a turntable, plug it in, and start spinning records.  For the audio enthusiast, there was always low output moving coil cartridges, and the resultant step-up-transformer you could use to present a signal to the phono input, but the built in was always used.  When the CD came to dominate, that the good 'ol built-in phono input went away.  A minor proliferation of external phono stages began as analog declined, but it left the mass market's consciousness as the silver disc rose in domination.  Given the people sticking to their vinyl through the near death of the medium were mostly performance oriented enthusiasts.  The state of the art playback for analog rose considerably (both in performance and price) during this dark time.  Now that vinyl is beginning to flirt with becoming mainstream again, brands are introducing their own ta...

The Rondo Bronze in all the Glory One of the largest sources of distortion and excellence in any LP setup is the cartridge.  We're big fans of Ortofon, and we took a big leap first jumping from a Grado Sonata1 to a Denon DL-103R then to the underappreciated, excellent Ortofon Rondo Bronze. We listen to a lot of vinyl, around 8-10 hours a week.  But keep meticulous care of our records and clean the needle with every side of a disk.  This means that at best we'd have 1500 hours of enjoyment.  At our rate that is right around 3 years.  We're into year 2, and while everything still sounds fantastic, it is time to start the long arduous process of finding a replacement, since in the mean-time, Ortofon has discontinued the Rondo line.  They have consolidated most of their LOMC offerings into two series:  "Quintet" and "Cadenza" I can have the Rondo Bronze retipped (3rd party), or I can replace it with a Quintet or Cadenza.  Or look elsewhere, but ...

We dug out the trusty Denon DL-103R and mounted it on the Acoustic Research "Arche" Headshell ... and got an incredible musical presentation once about 15 hours had passed with some fussing and adjusting. The Denon's sound will continue improving as your tone-arm and turntable get upgraded, but does justice to what you already have.  It responds very well to careful alignment, but it's forgiving of less careful alignment.  It can go toe to toe with carts costing multiples of its US$379 MSRP (Street price slightly less).  If the basic sound is to your liking, there is also a small cottage industry that takes the DL103 and 103R and hotrods them, too.  The Denon DL-103R is not a perfect cartridge by any means, but it is one of those rare true "giant killers" where you have to spend a lot more to do better, and makes you ask "why bother" when considering such an upgrade. We were happy to recommend it earlier, we're happy to double down on...

Birch and Mahogany Plinth -- in the Project/Music Hall world not obtainable unless you spend twice as much.  FWIW. "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar" ~ T. Marshall "What this country needs, is a decent 5W Amp!" ~ P. W. Klipsch The box arrived on our doorstep a few days earlier than we had figured - it had taken less than a week.  I had been in multiple IM sessions with Scott Bingaman, the President of Deer Park Distributors (The exclusive distributors of Crosley Turntables to the US and Canada), who had indicated that they were onto something big, something that was a real step up for them from their traditional retro-styled products. "This won't be sold at Target or Urban Outfitters.  It'll be primarily sold online, at indie record stores and high end dealers - targeted at a younger audience looking to move up," Scott said.  After I had asked how much better it would be, given the reputation Crosley has in au...

Rondo +  Arché  Headshell We recently pressed into service in the middle of our Koru phonostage listening tests, an Ortofon Rondo Bronze and the Acoustic Science  Arché  Headshell.  This poses a couple of problems - the most significant is that we changed far too many variables to keep the "listening impressions" review intact, and the improvement is so large, we're not undoing them.   Scientific method be d***ed ... we are going to re-do the listening impressions and redo the review ... First up, and the crack in the foundation of our carefully constructed "one variable at a time" discipline, was when we took out the Denon and pout in the Ortofon Rondo Bronze in a standard headshell.  It was a solid improvement in every important way- especially a sense of refinement we hadn't had with the Denon.  Having experience with this cartridge before, we decided to continue with the tests, and we were on our merry way reviewing albums for the r...