Reader’s System: Vinyl Valhalla!

By Rich Teer | December 24th, 2010

This Reader’s System is something really special. It was a few months in the organising, but it was well worth the wait! In November I visited the music room of Mike from North Bend. He’s the general manager of an automobile dealership, and has a wonderful music room!

If you’d like your system to be featured in our Reader’s System series, just send us an email. In the meantime, here’s the transcript of the chat I had with Mike before we settled down for an all-too-short listening session with a couple of his friends.

What’s your background? Tell us a bit about yourself.

Well, I’ve been married 36 years, I have two grown children, my daughter’s married but no grand kids. I’m 59 years old and have lived in the Seattle area since 1955, so I’m kind of a native although I was originally from Minnesota. I’m a general manager at a large automobile dealership with 130 employees. I work six days per week, so my audio hobby is a stress relief. I don’t have time for a sailboat or a summer home ’cause I’m working all the time. I can do this every night and I’ve come to really enjoy the social part of the hobby. So that’s kinda the background that brought me to this. I find it to be a lot of fun, and I relate to the people that I meet through the hobby: it seems that they have similar value to me—except for these two guys of course! [Laughs] So basically, I have fun with it and it enriches my life.

Where did you get your love of hi fi and music?

I grew up in the 1960s, I love 1960s’ rock big time. I listened to the radio. I bought a stereo tape deck when I was in high school and recorded off the radio, and took that real seriously. When I was at the university I had various hi-fis. When I first got married I had the Bose 901s, the McIntosh, and various turntables. Then the kids came along, I probably took 15 years off with that, eventually sold all my records and just listened to some CDs. I had a boat when the kids were growing up, and family was the focus and really, the music was there but not with any great focus.

Then, in 1994, after the kids had finished high school and moved out, that’s when I kinda got back into it and I bought some used Watt Puppies. My brother in law really introduced me to it when I heard a CAL Audio DAC and I heard how much better it was than my Pioneer CD player, which I thought was great. That kinda kicked me off, so I still blame it all on him!

Sounds like a reasonable excuse!

Yes, exactly! [Laughs]

Roughly how many records do you have?

A little over 10,000, probably. I also have about 3,000 CDs, about 1,000 SACDs, and probably 60 or 70 10.5” 15 IPS quarter-inch master dubs, and maybe another 100 prerecorded 7.5” reels, so I’m pretty heavily into tape and getting more so as time goes by.

What’s your favourite genre of music and what are some of your favourite records?

My favourite genre of music lately, as the system has matured, is the one I know least about, and that’s classical. But that’s only been true in the last year or so. As the system has really matured, the classical music seems to speak to me the most. [Hands me a record] Right now I’d say that’s probably my favourite record. It’s a Hungarian pressing of a cello and a double bass, and it’s absolutely intoxicating.

Are you familiar with the Starker boxed set? I’m only asking because I recently got it.

Yes, I have the boxed set of that. That’s really good, I have a number of string quartets that are just wonderful. I don’t really know much about the music, you know, but it just seems to... I love a lot of jazz, and I have some great pop and rock, and really, I don’t know if I have a particular favourite. Probably some Ella Fitzgerald and Miles, and Ben Webster. I name my network Webster after Ben Webster, so he’s probably my favourite jazz player all around.

Roughly how often do you listen to vinyl as opposed to other sources?

Well, in the last three or four months, I’d say I’m about 70% vinyl, but I’d say formerly I was probably 30% vinyl. It’s just a maturing, it’s just come of age, you know, a bunch of stuff has fallen into place. So I’m really now mostly vinyl, whereas I used to be probably 50% or 60% digital, I’m now 20%, maybe 10% digital.

Ah, so you’ve seen the light?

Right. Now, I have a server upstairs, as well as all this stuff here, so I have 2,000 or 2,500 high res files on the server. So, I mean, that’s pretty good. Last night I was tired, I wasn’t in the mood for even getting out of the chair, so I just played digital, you know, a lot of Red Book off the server, and it was great. So once in a while, I’m a little spent, and the digital’s so easy, and it still sounds great and my system has matured recently.

What was your first system, and how has it evolved over the years?

Wow, how far do you want me to get into this, ’cause there’s a lot!

Well, as much as you feel like sharing.

OK, I’ll try to do this quickly! Since I got back into the high-end, in 1994, I’ll step through and I’ll try to do it quickly. OK, I started out with used Watt Puppies 3.2 and I had an ARC D400 Mk 2 solid state amp. I think I might have had a Levinson preamp and Levinson digital, and I had a VPI TNT Mk 2 with, I think, a Benz Glider cartridge and an Audio something or other phono stage. So that’s where I started.

Then I went to Watt Puppy 5.1s, I got the Levinson 335 amp, then from there I got the Levinson 32, which was the big preamp. I went to the Levinson 33H and the Watt Puppy 6s, and then I got the big Levinson 33 amps. So this is about 1999. I switched from the TNT to the Basis 2500, got a Graham 1.5tc arm, the Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum, and then I got an Aesthetix Io phono stage. The Io was probably a watermark item for me, because I think my whole brain changed. At the time it was phenomenal, so then I decided that the whole Levinson/Wilson program was wrong, after spending a little time with the Io.

I went pretty high end this time, based just off a review, I got a pair of Kharma Exquisite 1Ds, which at the time was very expensive. I got really lucky: I got hooked into a new distributor when he was first acquiring the line, so I got a very, very good buy on it. I searched around for a tube amp to go with them, and I ended up with the Tenor OTL, which is a 70 W output transformerless tube amp and I absolutely loved it. It was a passive integrated amp, which was when I dumped my Levinson preamp ’cause the Tenor was dramatically better without a preamp, without the Levinson. So then I went to the Placette passive preamp because I loved the way it worked. At about that time I was very happy with the Kharma and Tenor, just in love with it really. I still love that sound.

I was able to acquire a Rockport System II Sirius, which had been a dream turntable of mine, and prior to that I had got into a Clearaudio Insider Gold cartridge, which I liked better than the Rosewood in many ways.

But then when I got into the Rockport, I accidentally stumbled onto a van den Hul Colibri, and that just smoked everything I’d ever heard, so I became I real Colibri fanatic. Also at that time, I was given a couple of phono stages to try, one of which was the Io Signature with two power supplies, and also a Lamm LP2. It turned out, I didn’t expect to, that I preferred the Lamm to the big Io. It just seemed that it was better over all. And then, about a year later, I was presented the opportunity to upgrade my Rockport to the System III Sirius, and that was a pretty big deal. So I sold the [System] two and got the [System] three. And I was happy, but I was in a different home, where I’d taken my room as far as I could take it. So I was either gonna add on to my house, make a bigger room, because I had a 12’ by 18’ room. It was great in many ways, but it was also limited in many ways. So I decided instead not to invest in my neighbourhood and add to my home, so that’s when I decided to change homes to find a better room. And I ended up here.

And what a room!

Well, it’s always been “what a room”, but it hasn’t really always worked. It’s been six years of learning, for me, here. First of all, the Kharmas that I had, which I loved, were just not adequate to generate bass in this room, although in retrospect now, because I’ve since modified the room in some ways, probably the Kharmas could have been OK if I would have done the modifications back then, but I didn’t really understand it. When I got into this room, it was beyond my level of perceptions, or my level of maturity as a listener. So I had to grow a lot before I recognised some inadequacies in the room. So I got rid of the Kharmas and got Von Schweikerts, which were great speakers.

I loved the Kharmas, there’s nothing wrong with Kharmas, but I needed more bass. It turned out later that there were some room issues that were causing that problem, but I don’t believe at this point that the Kharmas would have been able to get the job done, although now, six years later, I’ve basically solved that problem of being overly damped in the bass in the room. I’ve also found that I can get the linearity in the bass with the Von Schweikerts and my Evolutions, plus I can get much deeper, more full bass.

So, anyway, I went to the Von Schweikert VR-9SEs, loved them, they’re great. I had ’em for almost for two years and had no intention of getting rid of them, then a friend from Hong Kong that had visited me was looking for that model and it was going to take eight months for him to get them, and he wondered if mine were for sale. So I sold him mine even though I was planning to because I had some bigger ones, the VR-11s, in mind. So I ordered some VR-11s and even got some VR-7s to use as demos while the VR- 11s were being built, but it turned out that they never built them. So I ended up actually buying the Evolutions, it wasn’t really something I had an agenda to do, it’s just how things worked out.

So that was the speaker side of things. When I went from the Kharmas to the Von Schweikerts, I eventually switched to the darTZeel from the Tenor. I felt like the darTZeel was kinda like music: it didn’t sound like tubes and it didn’t sound like solid state, but it had the linearity of solid state and it also had a breath of life, plus it also had super low noise of course.

So I really liked, after the Tenor tubes, the darTZeel did not make me think of solid state and yet it did the things the Tenor did even better, so I switched that amplifier. That was seven years ago, and I still have the darTZeel. So I’ve had the same speakers for about five years and the same amplifiers for about seven years now. About a year after I got the darTZeel, I replaced my passive preamp with the darTZeel preamp, and I still have that.

On the digital side, I had the EMM Labs for a long time, then about four years ago I switched to the Playback Designs.

In terms of turntables, ever since I had the Kharmas I had the Rockport System II Sirius and then about a year later, in 2002, I got the System III Sirius, which I still have. So that was my turntable. I went with the Lamm phono stage back in 2003. I had that for three years until I got the darTZeel. Then three years ago I added a couple more turntables: a vintage Garrard 301 with a Steve Dobbins plinth and then I had a Technics SP10 Mk 2 then an SP10 Mk 3, again with a Steve Dobbins plinth and Reed arms. Then I had a Tri-Planar arm and a number of different cartridges. Since I had my Basis turntable with the Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum, I had a Clearaudio Insider Gold, and then I got into the van den Hul Colibris. I eventually owned seven different Colibris over about a seven year period. I usually had two or three at a time, and they were my favourite cartridges. What happened was that I had one that was really, really nice, and they’re a very edgy cartridge. It’s a cartridge that is very minimal. It’s like a Formula 1 car: they’re very minimalist, there’s no body really. The one I had was an XC, which has a copper winding and polycarbonate body. I had one that was very natural sounding, I used it on my Rockport and I had it for five years. Then about three years ago, I was cleaning the top of my Rockport and snagged it on the rag and wiped it out.

Ouch!

I had it repaired and I bought three or four more, but I couldn’t find another one that was as well behaved as that one. So about two years ago I sold my last Colibri, and now I have the Ortofon A90—I have two of those—and I have a Lyra Olympos SL, which is the low output version. The Olympos is on the Rockport and the A90s are on The Beat turntable, which is a new turntable that supplanted the SP10 Mk 3 in my system. The Beat is a Steve Dobbins built turntable, and I have a Miyajima Premium Be mono cartridge on the Garrard.

Something that’s happened this year is that I’ve got a couple of Talea arms from Joel Durrant. He’s a local gentleman, and those arms I consider to be probably the best pivoted arms I’ve ever heard. I also have two Reed arms, which are very, very good—maybe the second best pivoted arms I’ve heard. So I have a total of five arms.

I also have a Allnic H-3000 phono stage, the newer version with the bigger trannies, and I’m very, very impressed with that. I’ve not yet determined which phono stage I like better: the Allnic or the darTZeel. I probably lean towards the darTZeel, but I’ve not yet answered that question in my mind completely so I use both.

Three years ago I also got into reel to reel tape. Tape is my best source: as good as my turntables are, the tape’s better. I have a Studer A-820 and an Ampex ATR-102. I also have some custom output electronics called the Cello. It’s actually made by a person called Charles King, so I call it a King Cello. It’s actually a phono stage as well as output electronics for the tape decks.

So that’s the evolution of my system. The other thing I will mention is that my room has evolved dramatically in the last year. It took me five years to determine that my room was over damped, so this year I did three major things to the room. I took out some huge bass traps that were in sides of the front of my room. They were actually 15 feet long and 10 feet tall. I took out those and added something called Quiet Rock, which is actually a very substantial panel which gives you a room boundary. I also removed quite a bit of bass trapping in my ceiling, and the third thing I did was adding an Equi=Tech wall cabinet. I have a 10 kW balanced isolation transformer. So those three things, taking the ceiling traps out, taking the front traps out, and adding the wall panel made a huge difference in the performance of my room.

So that’s basically the whole picture. I didn’t go into the tweak things; let’s call them minor so I didn’t go into those.

It sounds like you’ve had quite a journey! What’s next on your equipment wish list?

Honestly, and I really mean this, I would say that I have nothing on my equipment wish list at all right now. There are two things that could happen next year, but they’re things that if they don’t happen, that’s fine. One of them is that there are some darTZeel monoblocks which are amazingly expensive and if I got them I’d basically be selling one turntable and some other things to be able to do that. So that could happen, I might decide to do that: switch from the stereo amp to the monoblocks. It really wouldn’t change the essence of the system in any way, and the stereo amp really is amazing, but it would just give the system more horsepower. You know, there’s nothing like headroom!

The other thing is that’s there’s an MMSeven, which is a step beyond these speakers. It’s a two tower arrangement, basically the same speaker but times two. So those two things are possibilities, but the parts don’t really exist. I mean, I’ve had the monoblocks in my room—I had the prototypes in my room a year ago—and they’re amazing, and the MMSevens have not yet been built. It’s just a concept.

So those are the only two things. I am completely... I’m where I wanted to be. Three years ago I bought reel to reel machines and I also bought turntables, and it’s taken me three years to get them to where I wanted them to be. I finally reached that point just recently. Six years ago I built the room; after six years the room is finally doing what I wanted it to. So the things that I really wanted to accomplish, gear wise and system wise, I’m there. Though I will say this: it’s been painful to spend all this time on the gear. Even though last year I bought a collection of 2,500 classical LPs, and I’ve got 12,000 LPs and 4,000 CDs and a hard drive full of high res, honestly I want to get away from the gear and I want focus on getting the best pressings of certain disks, find more new music, so I really just wanna get my brain off of gear—even the room—and just enjoy the music. How I built up my collection was that even though I was a gear head, I spent an awful lot of time acquiring music, and that was really what gave me great pleasure and the last six years with the room, I’ve not been able to put the money or the time into that like I’d like and so the joy of the hobby hasn’t been quite what it had been. In some ways. The room now, finally, is very satisfying and so I’ll say that the pain has been worth it to get to where I am performance wise, but I want to get that in the music too, ’cause that’s really where the fun is.

Equipment List

Power source Equi=Tech 10WQ Wall Panel System with dedicated double grounding rod. There is a separate service panel for lights, HVAC and “dirty outlets” independent of the Equi=Tech panel. The Equi=Tech supplies 13 lines to the listening room using 10 gauge Romex, each of which is terminated with Oyaide R-1 receptacles and WCP-Z outlet covers.
Analogue sources Rockport Sirius III System air bearing turntable and arm; Steve Dobbins Kodo The Beat turntable with Talea and Reed arms; Garrard 301 with a Steve Dobbins plinth, Talea and Reed arms; Studer A-820 1/4” Master recorder, Ampex ATR-102, and Technics RS-1500 tape decks.
Cartridges Lyra Olympos SL, Ortofon A90, Azden YM-P50VL, Miyajima Premium Mono Be.
Digital sources Playback Designs MPS-5 DAC and disc player, dedicated music server.
Phono stage Allnic H-3000.
Preamp darTZeel NHB-18NS.
Power amp darTZeel NHB-108b.
Speakers Evolution Acoustics MMThree, with integral powered subwoofers.
Cables Phono: Nordost Valhalla. Interconnects: Transparent Audio Opus MM2, Evolution Acoustics BNC LINKs. Speaker: Transparent Audio Opus MM2. AC: Absolute Fidelity.
Accessories Oyaide R-1 outlet equipped MTB-6 power strip; Grand Prix Audio Monaco SE equipment racks; Wave Kinetics A10 U8 isolation footers; Combak Harmonix RF-999MT Mk 2 footers; Walker lead filled; Audio Desk Record Cleaning System record cleaning machine; Acoustic Revive RL-30 LP demagnetiser.