Musings...

Hi everyone, this is my first attempt to publish a blog as it's popularly known in today's IT world. I'm not an excellent writer who spends his time facing the computer and penning down thoughts and perils of everyday life. This blog serves to capture my actual daily regiments to share with close friends..

This whole month and the last half of July'06, I've been eagerly packing home early to listen to my long awaited and upgraded hifi analogue setup. After climbing to the Roksan Xerxes X from the venerable Linn Sondek LP12, I must say that this new deck is more accurate and musically more competent compared to the latter. What we're talking here is accuracy of the music reproduced.

What I mean by accuracy is the speed and the pitch of the Roksan. Gone are the fat mid blooms and fluid tastes of the LP12 which although sexy and lusty to my ears, were somewhat slowing things down; tempo, immediacy, drive. I was getting to the point of thinking if this is actually in the recording itself or merely a character of the table. The latter was getting more evident after several nights reading about LP12 musings itself...

This is especially evident with punchier recordings from the 60s and 70s, be it New Orleans jazz or Chicago blues, or simply to 'Men At Work' and 'Toto'. With the Naim Aro unipivot tonearm, I am having a treat too. This arm is a major engineering feat by Naim: bass so taut from a unipivot only a good designer could achieve. On the cartridge end, tracking duties for those tiny grooves of the black vinyls are now passed on to the superbly sounding ZYX Airy 3X MC cartridge. Previous groove trackers in my LP12 setup included the excellent value Denon 103R, the Dynavector 17D2Mk2, and the Roksan Shiraz (which has the best output drive of them all).

In my entire vinyl record playing years, this has got to be the highest resolution cartridge I've ever heard from any analogue system, period. And, it even exceeds the clean and transparent presentation of the CDs... Definitely a legendary MC in the making. Separation and layering of musicians have never been better. It's like literarly watching a live performance in a club..need I say more?

And, I'm having a treat listening to all my vinyl records once again...

I'm having a blast! Join me? :-)