May 2015
In This Issue... Analogue And Digital Music Playback
Editorial By Noel Keywood

 

  With turntables making a comeback, and firm interest in Direct Drive remaining from the glory days of the late 1970s when Technics, Sony et al made them, we couldn’t help but take a close look at a new entrant, VPI’s Classic Direct. OK, it is expensive almost beyond belief but as you can read in our review on p10 it is also pretty damn unique. Hi-fi should not consist solely of me-too products built upon an inventory of standard parts; innovation is needed. VPI have gone to a U.S. motor manufacturer for a super hi-tech solution to spin LP perfectly.

I hope you like our in-depth look at the VPI; it shows you where solutions come from – and may well be coming from in future. Yes, there is more to all this... I have had a long conversation with a UK servo-systems engineer who has designed some deeply sophisticated hi-fi products and he is working on his own unique Direct Drive motor – I will be keeping tabs on its progress. Direct Drive is a motor/control system technology with legs, as they say, but in this case they don’t provide propulsion! We will be hearing more about it as vinyl sales increase and turntable demand returns.

I never thought a hi-fi system could be run from a headphone amplifier but innovative people – Moon in this tale – have other ideas. The new Moon 430HA is a headphone drive machine of almost baffling complexity, as you can learn in our review on p42 This is where hi-fi is going at present.

CD isn’t dead, and CD players still arrive for review, if not so frequently as they once did. So Arcam’s new CDS27 was a welcome arrival, especially because it offers quite a few features I’d never thought a CD player would take on. It even had me scratching my head over new, high quality network file reading software. You can see why Martin Pipe was so enthusiastic about this player on p16.

For those many people who write in pleading with us to cover the digital recording of LP we have both the new Furutech GT40 Alpha specifically purposed for this role – see p58 – and a Feature on how to use it – see p82. I hope this brings light to the world of recording in digital; it isn't as easy as cassette, but you don't get tape jams either!

Standing back I see this issue is a meld of old and new – from Direct Drive to digital recording. I do hope you find it interesting.

--- Noel Keywood, editor.

 

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