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

By -
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Thorens MM002 and MM008 meet the Crosley C10 (Part 2 of 2)

By -
Image
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 tables and phono stages aime
Read more

The Thiel CS3.7 part 2: Listening Impressions

By -
Image
The Thiel CS3.7's Driver ... pay no attention to the green turntable light that couldn't help but photobomb ... We were looking forward to the demo all week.  We showed up at around noon on Columbus Day - which allowed the salesman, Bob Cesarini, to spend about a week breaking in the speakers.  Given our experience with Thiel, and the fact that they take a long time to break in, this was a good thing. The speakers had about 75 hours or so, so while not fully run in, they would be much better than a "right out of the box" sound. Most of the ugly portion of the break in would be behind it. Bob told us that the factory claims 300+ hours are needed for them to reach their full potential, but at the point of the demo, we should be able to hear what earned them their reputation.  We'll see ... After Bob gave us the basic introduction to the speaker and his optimistic thoughts on the new owners and the direction of Thiel, he left us to our own devices. (Stereophi
Read more

The Oyaide Tonearm Cable: Everything matters. Really.

By -
Image
We're using this cable right now, and wow do we hear more music. It took me nearly a decade to come to terms with the simple concept that seemingly innocuous things, such as placing pennies under speaker spikes, or swapping out one cable for another one, can have such dramatic effects.  Some you can explain by understanding a likely mechanism, and some ... you just don't know why, you just hear what.  As an electrical engineer, my mind has to deal with quite a bit of cognitive dissonance once in awhile over this.  And I just have to tell myself at that point that "as long as it sounds better, I shouldn't get too worried" when something that shouldn't make a difference, makes a difference. In fact, there is an ongoing debate, really heated sometimes, about various tweaks.  Like American politicians discussing US policy - there is an awful lot of shouting, yelling, hurt feelings, and anger with no resolution.  Thankfully your stereo doesn't end up shu
Read more