A powerful gauge of how interested people are in a particular audio demonstration is how far they are prepared to attend it. Many MAC members travel considerable distances to attend each monthly meeting or to go to the various weekend special-interest groups (e.g. to Leigh and Roxy Hibbins' abode in far-away Glenloyne in October 2018 for an afternoon-evening of pop: see my report on our mass expedition in MAN Issue 519). Even so, I think my effort this month tops them all: that day I had to travel back from field work in far-western New South Wales, up near Broken Hill, to listen to the evening's demonstration of OAD, Kuzma and ATC gear. The trip home involved a 250 km drive through a relentless dust-storm, along a rough, unsealed and dreadfully corrugated road for 3.5 hours back to Mildura (Figure 1), then a 1.5-hour flight in a noisy, turbo-prop, chartered plane to Melbourne. Why the effort? Well, as I've described in an earlier report (MAN Issue 523), I simply love ATC speakers; moreover, I've known Jon De Sensi from OAD for at least 25 years (see my write-up of his earlier demonstration to the club, MAN Issue 510) and I reckon the turntables made by Franc Kuzma in Slovenia are among the world's best (and best value too). So how could I possibly miss this event?

Warwick Freemantle and Rom Beyerie from Pure Music Group brought along a Kumza turntable (Stabi S turntable with Stogi S arm) fitted out with an EMT HSD 006 moving coil cartridge from Berlin, Germany. Prices? $3,300, $2,000 and $2,300, respectively, so all up about seven and a half thousand dollars for the gorgeous bronze-and-black device to play vinyl on.

Accompanying the turntable was a pair of ATC SCM50ST ASL active threeway speakers from the ATC Classic series ($26,000). In passive form, these speakers cost $19,000, so you get the tri-way amplification in the active version for a mere $7,000 or so. Pretty good, considering there are six bijou amplifiers in the two speakers (one for each drive unit), and they are all Class AB (i.e. not the cheap Class D found in so many subwoofers). Linking everything together was an ATC CDA2 Mk 2 pre-amplifier-DAC, a device that combines a CD drive, a 32-bit DAC from the Japanese manufacturer AKM capable of digital inputs up to 328 kHz PCM and native DSD 256, an alldiscrete Class A pre-amplifier and a headphone output. Cost? $5,500.

But what use is a turntable and a pre-amplifier and active speakers without a phonostage? Jon De Sensi came to the rescue with his new OAD Ultrafidelity UP1 phonostage. (OAD Ultrafidelity equipment is handled by Pure Music Group.) Jon described the UP1 as being a two-box, dual-mono layout with the power supply in a separate container, linked by a thick umbilical cord to phonostage proper. It offers a staggering range of gain, from 40-80 dB, via ultra-low noise dual-mono opamps specifically designed for MM/ MC use, and with eight choices of impedance for the optimal matching of moving coil and moving magnet cartridges (20 ohms to 47,000 ohms). The EQ stage is active; there's a choice of single-ended (i.e. RCA) or balanced (i.e. XLR) outputs, and the case is a beautiful CNC-machined aircraft-grade aluminium alloy. It's about half the size of a house brick, and about as heavy. It is available in black only, but it still a pretty little thing. (The silver version of the OAD pre-amplifier is especially gorgeous: see the OAD webpage at https://sonicpurity.com.au/brands/oad/

Warwick promised us a fully vinyl evening (LPs, not clothing) and so it was to be. Track 1 started everything off: Side 1/Track 2 ('88 Basie Street') off the 1984 LP by Count Basie and his Orchestra, 88 Basie Street. Track 2, 'Funeral March of a Marionette' ('Marche funebre d'une marionnette'), is, according to the web, a short piece by Charles Gounod, originally written for solo piano in 1872 and orchestrated in 1879. My notes re the sound? - "dynamic, open, clarity".

Track 3 saw a marked change of pace and style: an LP from a Sydney band, The Cruel Sea. Once again my notes were all positive: "trod a fine line between being detailed but not harsh; involving but not tiring; bloody good".

Track 4 saw another change of pace, this time to Ms Rickie Lee Jones, with 'Easy Money', off her 1979 self-titled album.

Track 5: the lovely 'The thrill is gone', off the again self-titled Jerry Garcia & David Grisman album from 1991. This song was originally released in 1951 (by Roy Hawkins) and has been covered by the guitarist Robin Trower (in 2013) - and, of course, by B.B. King (first in 1969) in what is perhaps the best-known version. My notes: "fast and utterly uncoloured". Warwick kept a bluesy theme with the next track, Keb' Mo' playing a stylish piece of slide guitar on 'Every morning' off the self-titled album.

Back to a more Classical/Romantic theme for Track 7: an excerpt from Claude Debussy's 'Iberia', composed between 1905-1920. I thought the reproduction was "simply captivating, thrilling" but also noted that the sound might not be to everyone's liking. Those wanting a more warm, arguably coloured, rendition might want to look (hear?) elsewhere, but there's no doubting the stunning clarity and cleanness of the audio set-up on the night. And extra thanks here to Warwick for clearly announcing the title of each track before playing the LP (something many demonstrators fail to do) but with only one exception, when some wit from the audience called out "Face us; you can't speak through your bum". It was received in good humour, in the same good-humoured way it had been uttered.

Track 8: The delightful obscurity of the Russian balalaika ('Fantasy on two folk songs'). At this stage in the evening I started to drift off, not from boredom but because I was mesmerised by the sound (and, I must admit, a bit weary from the gruesome travel earlier in the day).

Track 9: Jennifer Warnes singing 'The hunter', arguably compromised by too much chatter in the audience. Please, MAC members, no more idle chatter while music is being played: it's disrespectful to the kind people who visit us with their gear and it pisses off those of us who want to listen to what's being played.

Track 10 was one of my favourite singers, Nina Simone, singing 'Little girl blue'. The website Discogs says she first recorded this song in 1959 and was responsible for the lyrics and the piano playing. Warwick's version came off the 2012 My baby just cares for me double LP compilation (Not for Now Music, UK). He chose this LP because he'd said found it so hard to get good recordings of Ms Simone; wonderful songs, great singing, mostly ghastly recording/mixing/mastering. Piano is always a tough test for speakers and by luck some members of the club were treated to Chris Mogford's QUAD 2912 electrostatic (fed by Nelson Pass 100 watt per channel Class A monoblocks) speakers on the Friday night pop session. It's arguably the case that no speakers in the world can reproduce piano as well as the big QUADs, but the ATCs were certainly not disgraced on the Wednesday before. Ms Simon's voice was simply 'there', with no embellishment and no ornamentation. Again the words I scrawled down included the descriptor, "just so clean".

Track 11: the incomparable Ray Charles, accompanying Betty Carter performing 'Baby it's cold outside'. This was a startling recording, with the ATCs (and don't forget the turntable and the phonostage, since what we heard was the end-result of the synergy of the whole system, it being impossible to separate out the role played by any one component) portrayed the transients with astonishing clarity.

Track 12: Yello Baby, performing 'Rubberbandman' and sounding very Leonard- Cohenish while doing so. It was here that I was amazed by the 9" bass driver in the ATCs: to fill a room as big as the Willis Room, and one having an acoustic as nasty as the Willis Room, with a believable bass is simply astonishing. The bass was fast and clean and deep and - unlike the case with 99% of demonstrations in the Willis Room - completely non-boomy. "By golly I could live with this set-up", I thought to myself.

We had a well-deserved evening coffee break and most of the audience slipped back into their seats for the remaining tracks. (Some had scampered off for an early coco and bedtime at home with the missus.)

Track 13 was off Michael Hedges Aerial Boundaries LP, recorded in 1984 on the Wyndham Hill label. Here I heard the beginnings of everything I dislike about many modern recordings (even from self-proclaimed audiophile labels such as WH). The ultra close-miked sound of many 1980s records is exaggerated by systems as ruthlessly revealing as the Kuzma/OAD/ATC setup we heard on Wednesday night. It's not the fault of the audio equipment; it's the fault of the record producers of the 1980s and their approach to recording music.

Things got worse with Track 14, the dire 'Love in the drug' track off Grace Jones' 1980 ghastly album Warm leatherette. Apparently this was an audience request (sorry), but even so this new wave/dub/synth pop/disco/reggae stuff from the 1980s does nothing for me. The music that most excites me aurally - and moves me emotionally and makes me ponder cerebrally - is not the 64-track, uber-processed stuff that was generated in the 1980s and later, which mostly relies on close-miking of individual musicians to achieve a particular 'hi-fi' sound. The musicians on these recordings are often playing on separate continents, so there's no sense of a group of musicians playing together, no sense of a recording venue, no sense of collaboration among musicians and with the recording engineers.

In contrast, many recordings from 1950s and 1960s, made on simple 2 or 3 track Ampexes, were recorded in a single venue, with everyone in it playing together and bouncing musical ideas off each other, in real time. No digital mixing desks the size of small factories, no endless tinkering on a computer loaded with with ProTools, no 40 weeks of intricate mastering, just honest analog sound that replicates what was going on in the recording room at the time with that particular group of musicians hearing, seeing and feeling each other interactively. As a result, there's lots of 'bleed' between the different instruments in these old recording, plus the obvious ambience of the recording studio. People with good ears and much musical experience say they can tell which studio certain records were recorded in, simply from the ambience and the 'sound of the room'. That's what I love, not the clinical separation of 24 close-miked people playing individually, each with head phones on listening to a click track, each in their own little isolated world, with the (human) drummer who is charged with keeping everybody in time replaced by a digital drum loop, and the vocalist auto-tuned to within an inch of his/ her life, all of it fiddled with Pro Tunes. This modern stuff (well, some is approaching 40 years old now!) is, to me, entirely false and synthetic - it has no believability since the musicians were never playing together and interacting in the one spot, and all the 'mistakes' have been taken out via digital tinkering. It's all an artifact, a lie, something totally synthetic.

I'm not alone in feeling this way: I've recently read Neil Young's autobiography Waging heavy peace and Mr Young makes the same point about simplicity in recording. Harvest, for example, was mostly recorded in his barn in California, using two or three tracks and with a minimum of overdubbing. Look at the photograph on the rear cover of the LP to see how the assembled musos were all playing together, in the one venue (although I can count at least 8 microphones in the photo).

Keith Richards also agrees that simplest is best, as I outlined in my review of his autobiography Life in the August 2019 issue of MAN (Issue 528). Uncle Keef even went as far as to say (page 515) in his autobiography that:

"Very soon after Exile [on Main Street], so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn't know what was really going on. How could I get a great drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that's like someone shitting on a tin roof? Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they're swimming back. I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all. Fraboni [Ron Fraboni, record producer] has been through all of that, that notion that if you didn't have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn't know what you were doing. Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you're playing in this enormous room and not using any of it. It's the sound they make together, not separated. This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it's just totally against the whole grain of what music should be. / Nobody had the balls to dismantle it. And I started to think, what was it that turned me on to doing this? It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones. They were recording every little snitch of the drums or the bass. They were recording the room. You can't get these indefinable things by stripping it apart. The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where's the microphone for that? The records could have been a lot better in the 80's if we'd cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose by technology".

In agreement is the incomparable soul singer from the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Cooke. I'm currently reading his autobiography (Daniel Wolff, 1995, You send me: the life and times of Sam Cooke: William Morrow & Co, New York) and parts of the book address the type of sound Mr Cooke wanted to achieve. Referring to his recordings in the late 1950s on Keen Records, Wolff notes that:

"At recording time, the band would be given their charts and would then run down the tunes a couple of time to get the feel. Then they'd begin to tinker with it. This was before the era of singers singing to tracks, before rhythm sections wore headphones. The musicians played with each other and to the vocalist, and many of the people involved swear the quality of the music came from this direct contact. A lot of times, Sam would sit on a high stool and sing to the guys during rehearsal, What came out was on tape would be a live, simultaneous take with Sam, the rhythm section, the orchestra, the backup singers moving through the tune together" (page 193-194, my emphasis).

This from the guy, who in his soul period, who gave us 'You send me', 'Summertime', 'Only sixteen', 'Cupid', 'Wonderful world, 'Chain gang', 'Twisting the night away', 'Bring it on home to me'I think he knows what he's talking about and how records should be recorded.

And so it's only soul brothers or ageing rockers or folkies or indies who think this way about modern recording techniques? Nope. In a strange twist of serendipity, I was also reading an old copy of Stereophile (1996, Volume10, No. 5) over the weekend and came across an article on Bernard Haitink, famed leader of the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In the interview Haitink commented that "If you record in a good hall like the Amsterdam Concertgebouw or Boston Symphony Hall, you not only hear the orchestra, you hear the orchestra in the hall. Recordings should capture that". Hear, hear!

An antidote to the uniformly dire recording approaches from the 1980s? Read Jim Cogan and William Clark's Temples of sound: inside the great recording studios (2003: Chronicle Books, San Francisco) to see how it started to go horribly wrong 40 years ago. Ms Jones exemplifies the problem.

It was with Track 14 that a fellow MAN member, with infinitely greater musical experience and infinitely better hearing finesse than I possess, approached me and stated he thought the treble was "a bit tizzy" and "always the same" across the various tracks. He said it was a trivial criticism, given just how clean and uncoloured everything else was but, if he were forced to provide a criticism of the set-up, it would be with the extreme treble.

Track 15 saw us return to the real world and another recording classic: Harry Belafonte singing 'Losing hand', off the Belafonte sings the blues LP from 1958. This song was written by Jesse Stone and was first recorded and released by Ray Charles and his Orchestra in 1954. Great covers have been by Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale too.

The night finished up with Dire Strait's 'Private investigations', off the 1982 Love over gold album. Dire Strait's albums have always been known for their sound quality and certified audiophile status, and the final track certainly did not disappoint us. Maybe it just goes to show that even in the 1980s there were some recording people who knew what they were doing? Still, it's a very, very clean, almost antiseptic, sound. (You want an antidote to modern, clean and antiseptic? Try Sam Cooke's grimy, gritty, filthy, vivid, organismic One night stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, recorded in 1963 but not released by RCA until 1985 because they thought it too raucous.) To conclude: the statements I heard repeatedly during the night regarding the gear on demonstration were (1) "I could live with this" and (2) "uncoloured". Both sum up the sound for me too. Just as a willingness to travel might be a good test of how interested we are in hearing some piece of equipment or some piece of music, a robust test for how good an audio set-up is the question "Could I live with that"? The case, for me and I expect for many, many others in the audience on Wednesday night, was a resounding "Yes".

Full playlist (courtesy of Warwick):

88 Basie St, Pablo 2310-901
Gounod, Funeral March of a Marionette, RCA Victor LSC-2449
The Cruel Sea, High Plains Drifter, Indigo 0625-1
Rickie Lee Jones, Easy Money, WEA Musik WB 56628
Jerry Garcia & David Grisman, The Thrill is Gone, MFSL 2-430
Keb Mo, Every Morning, MFSL 1-357
Debussy Iberia, RCA Victor LSC-2222
Balalika Favourites, Fantasy on Two Folk Songs, Mercury SR90310
Jennifer Warnes, The Hunter, Somewhere Somebody, Private Music 211974
Nina Simone, Little Girl Blue, Not Now Music NOT2LP156
Ray Charles and Betty Carter, Baby Its Cold Outside, DCC LPZ-2005
Yello Baby, Rubberbandman, Mercury LC0268
Michael Hedges, Aerial Boundaries, Wyndham Hill WH-1032
Grace Jones, Love is the Drug, Island Records 90064-1
Belafonte Sings the Blues, Losing Hand, RCA Victor LSP-1972
Dire Straits, Love Over Gold, Private Investigations, Phonogram 6359-109

Paul I. Boon