The Clamp Upgrade

After I had spent considerable time listening to the Integris CDP, and felt ready to write this review, Derrick Moss sent the following message:

"I need to forewarn that I have an important tweak that has been in play for a bit now but is not in your unit (if that ain't an invitation to neurosis, what is). I guess I should send you the wee item that does the trick?? Do you have a 2mm hex screwdriver to take apart the transport disc clamp? If so I could send you the new innards for it.

Inside the clamp is a magnet and steel washer. All we want to do is remove the magnet and replace it with some mass. Maybe you have some lead shot?? Otherwise some more washers or whatever you got. To prevent rattling inside, gum it all up with a putty of some sort and screw it back together.

"Here's the back-story: at CES I got a tip that the transport performs better without the magnetic clamp and with a simple mass-clamping action instead. It took me a while to get around to trying it myself but sure enough there's more detail, space and realism to be had. Not that we're in bad shape without this mod (the system at CES used the magnet as did samples with previous reviewers) but all production is now going magnet-less and the reports from users is consistently excellent.

"The only drawback in use is that the non-magnet does not grip the disc as tightly which helps during start/stop of disc spinning. As a result, sometimes the disc can be heard to slip on the spindle for a second during start/stop. Once the disc is up and running it's no problem at all. I'm going to redesign the clamp for the next production run as a one-piece design of sufficient mass to hopefully eliminate the start/stop slippage all the time."

Oh no! First the fuse, then the clamp. Will this player ever sit still long enough for me to write a review? Whoever said that reviewing audiophile equipment is easy?

Biting the bullet, I asked Derrick to send me the modified clamp, so that I could compare it to the old one.

I was surprised to discoverer just how much of a difference this simple modification makes. Listening to Jeff Scott's "Titilayo," the opening track on the new, eponymous CD from the Grammy=nominated woodwind quintet, Imani Winds (Koch), I heard lots more air around instruments and more presence in upper frequencies. The presentation also seemed to move closer. Returning to the old clamp confirmed that the presentation was somewhat flatter, with duller highs. Comparing clamps on Valerie Coleman's "Umoja," another track on the disc that features guest artist Rolando Morales-Matos' percussion, the new clamp served up increased air around the triangle, allowing it to resound more freely and deliciously in space.

Air

I recognize that I'm talking about air so much that the skeptical reader may suspect that I'm a major airhead. What's with this air thing?

Last week, I had the privilege to sit in 6th row orchestra of Davies Symphony Hall as Rostropovich led the San Francisco Symphony in Shostakovich Symphony No. 5. What a thrill. Believe me, I didn't give a single thought to air, soundstaging, depth or the like. The sheer power and immediacy of the sound, the searing strings and ballooning tubas and trumpeting brass -- the near-overwhelming visceral and emotional impact of the music – rendered such concerns moot.

But my living room is not Davies Symphony Hall. My speakers are a point source, my amp 100W stereo, and the music medium composed of digital ones and zeros and lots of noise rather than analog waveforms. Perhaps a $200,000 system equipped with 600W monoblocks and huge Wilsons, Grand Utopias, ESP Concert Grands, or Pierre Gabriel's new Grand Masters (to name but a few speaker behemoths) and cutting edge SACD or lp playback can begin to convey the sheer enormity and color of a tuba when it goes "phhhhwhaaaat," let alone the collective sound of 100 orchestral players pouring everything they've got into a fortissimo passage. Neither my system nor most can.

Most of us in the high-end must thus make do with systems that, if they cannot convey music on the same scale as live performance, compensate with other rewards. One of these is air – the sense of space, three-dimensionality, and depth around sounds and images that gives the illusion that we are listening to music emanating from a three-dimensional source that, in the case of an orchestra, occupies a far bigger space than our listening rooms. Air is especially crucial in two-channel audio, where there are no rear speakers to create additional ambience.

It is certainly possible to overdo air, to space images too far apart, and/or to create a cartoon-like, holographic soundstage that seems so arrestingly 3-D that it becomes an end in itself, rendering the music secondary. Save for some ill-tuned Chameleon speakers, I have yet to encounter such a problem in my listening room. Rather, the more air I can get, the more enjoyment I experience.

It's a bit like a "blacker black." We often don't realize how important a silent soundstage is until the noise floor drops a bit, and more color and detail emerges from the silence. Once you hear the difference, you recognize its importance. In the case of the excellent Aurum Acoustics Integris CDP, the player is so good that the better you can get it to function, the greater the rewards.

Click Here to Go to Part VI.