Marpa Music - Vinyl for Sale - Audio Archives - MP3 Jukeboxes

Recorded music has always been an important part of my life but it's taken a while for me to realise how essential it is to have a really good system in order to actually hear all the musical information available on my records and CDs. I also have to admit that, halfway through the 1980s, I was totally brainwashed into getting rid of my records and switching entirely to CD. What a mistake to make! All was not lost though and, some 13 years ago, I started collecting records again and haven't looked back since. Many early CDs had a very poor sound and couldn't communicate the soul of the music I wanted to hear and even now I still often get more of the 'message' from my records than those shiny discs.

My first turntable since picking up the vinyl bug was a Garrard Zero 100SB which I used with a simple Ortofon cartridge in combination with an Audioanalyse PA4 amplifier and Tannoy 609 dual concentric speakers. The Garrard is a nice turntable which can be tweaked in all kinds of ways (see the excellent info at TNT Audio) but the system as a whole didn't have the clout I wanted and my friend Rudolf Bruil advised me to try a Sony PS-X70 turntable via a Tandberg 3002 preamp into a Technics SE-9021 power amp.
At the beginning of 2005 I decided to do something about the poor resolution of my system and, after some surfing of the web, started by getting a pair of Yamaha NS-670 speakers. These are 1970s 3-way consumer speakers using similar drivers to the cult NS-1000 studio monitors which featured specially designed mid- and treble units using beryllium. The Yamaha NS-670s are amazingly fast, informative and musical speakers and their arrival set me off on a mission to find suitable amplification. They love valve gear so I went on the internet in search of affordable solutions. After toying with the idea of various second-hand solutions as well as a couple of Chinese built designs I came across an 'out of the ordinary' site going by the name of Eminent Audio which had a neat little Preamp called the Vitale that came with an excellent MM Phono stage as standard (perfect!) and it had also received rave reviews in Hifi News and HiFi World. I also discovered that this wonderful piece of gear was built by the legendary Glenn Croft. His avowed mission was to design amplification which would recreate as accurately as possible the actual musical performances available via Vinyl, CD, Tape and Radio sources.
Check out some past reviews of this little beauty and you'll see I'm not the only one to get excited by it's beguiling sound !!

After a few weeks of 'running in' the thing simply sounded so good that I could hardly get up and move away from my listening chair (to look at my email etc) without being drawn back again by the musical performances conjured up in my attic listening room. Mozart and Britten string quartets, the wonderful sounding Debussy Cello Sonata and other chamber music, orchestral music and opera sound equally fine. Jazz simply swings and sounds the way it should - musical, rhythymical and timbral elements are presented in a wholly natural, almost matter of fact way (aural honesty/the heart of the matter) as if it simply couldn't sound any other way. Rock music sounds better than it ever did, singers are 'there in the room' and all the different threads of mixes and electronic music are revealed with no problems whatsoever.
Not to say that what I now hear doesn't reveal the other areas of my system that could be improved on but rather that, despite the 'minusses', there are simply so many 'plusses' that any criticism seems churlish in the face of such heavenly music.
I eventually threw it the 'ultimate test' - a Melodiya recording of Prokofiev's War and Piece opera which kicks off with a huge choral piece that my old system couldn't cope with at all. The Vitale and Yamaha NS-670s had no problems with it, revealing with apparent ease all the strands of the choral and orchestral writing. Even when the wailing soprano Galina Vishnevskaya appeared on stage the system didn't go into shock and gave a very natural presentation of her voice with its 'particular' sound qualities without exaggerating it in any way. I was gobsmacked. Since my initial purchase of the Yamaha NS-670s I've been lucky enough to pick up two pairs of their bigger brothers, the NS-690s, as well as another two pairs of NS-670s which I am now using with my PC and for other audio and DVD duties. I reckon I've become rather addicted to their sound. Everything simply comes to life in front of my eyes with this combination - in fact, as the weeks and months have passed, it's as if the Vitale has simply unfolded its wings and started to fly!

So my current system is the Sony PS-X70 turntable and Denon DCD-1560 feeding the Croft Vitale preamp and the Technics SE-9021 power amp into Yamaha NS-690 speakers. The recent addition of some The Missing Link Cables and Eichmann Cablepods have brought everything into focus.
The "finishing touch" in my system is a combination of the The Universal Record Stabilizer Weight and the Universal Record Stabilizing Ring, both designed by audiophile and musiclover Rudolf Bruil. Visit his site Soundfountain (an extensive and invaluable source of audio and analogue hints/links/aids, info on turntables, cartridges, equipment etc.) to read more about the Record Stabilizing Ring & the Record Stabilizer Weight: both are, in my opinion, unmissable aids to vinyl reproduction. They improve tracking, speed of transients, solidity of vocal & instrumental images, depth of soundstage and aid the flow of musical information.

Cables Galore

The marketplace is full of companies selling cables offering to do all kinds of amazing things for your system and often for ridiculously exorbitant prices. I recently decided to upgrade my interconnects and, again after much surfing of the web, I finally found the people at The Missing Link who have a rather wonderful site with everything to fulfill your cable & plug needs. Their excellent hifi cables are handmade by designer Mark B. Sears and, in my humble opinion, they will certainly improve your system. They sell everything you might possibly need in the way of plugs, interconnects, loudspeaker cables, power cables, blocks etc. They even offer cables on loan, so you can try them out at home, and also offer a retermination service for your existing cables if you so wish. Give them a call and have a chat with Jan who's waiting to take your order and have a friendly chat into the bargain! Their prices are extremely competitive and their service is excellent.
I chose to start off with 3 pairs of their Coppermine interconnects terminated with Eichmann Bullet plugs to link up my Vitale with the Technics power amp as well as the 'ins' and 'outs' of my Tascam CD-recorder. Together with the fitting of a couple of Eichmann Cablepods to my NS-690s the result has been a substantial increase in quality of sound and musicality. Much improved are bass extension/definition, instrument and voice imaging/placement, allround natural tonal colour, reduced sibilance & distortion. The sounds are all more realistic & well defined, delivering clean, clear audio and getting me ever closer to the performances, whether live or in the studio. As you can gather I'm pleased with these products.

Windows on the Past

The musical intimacy available via the Vitale and my NS-690s grants me glimpses of history, musical moments in time and space, resurrected in my room so I could enjoy all the atmosphere of the original recording sessions. Transported via the sonic wormholes the Croft preamp opens up I can bask in the radiance and glory of artists who are often dead and buried (or very close to being). I've had a lot of fun rechecking out many of my records - ranging from some 70s and 80s Pablo recordings of Count Basie in small group settings with Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Zoot Sims, Harry "Sweets" Edison et al or my old CBS Ellington sides. Yves Montand - Live in Paris (a Japanese pressing of an old 1958 Philips HI-FI recording), Miles Davis - Seven Steps to Heaven (an original CBS "360 sound" pressing), Duke Ellington's Great Paris Concert on Atlantic and his CBS Indigos LP (another "360 sound" pressing), Miles Davis - Nefertiti & Bitches Brew, Ralph Towner - Solstice, Brubeck, Mulligan & Desmond - We're All Together Again for The First Time, The Bothy Band & The Chieftains, Alex Harvey's Faith Healer and Charlie Mingus' CBS Dynasty LP as well as Bach keyboard music by Alicia de Larrocha and Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto by Boris Belkin on Decca.