Thought I could possibly provide some input to this thread. Ever since I heard a Mayware Formula on a Michell Focus in the 80s I’ve wanted a pivot but when the Aro arrived hifi was on the back burner due to a young family etc. When I acquired the Xerxes in 2009 I still desperately wanted an Aro but although Roksan provided an arm board it was basically too late and I couldn’t find a dealer that could facilitate so an Artemiz it was.
Until December 2023 when I required a stylus retread and as I upgraded to an XVS1 I took the opportunity of asking Peter (@Cymbiosis) to install me a Vertere SG (HB) . 2 months on I can honestly say it’s never ever been this good, stunning musicality, timing, rhythm, insight etc, a reaffirmation of the genius of Coltrane. How good it would sound on a fully loaded LP12 or Avid, and of course Vertere one can start to imagine. In fact I’ve had an insight, a while back I heard a Vertere RG, Statement and Magicos - if you’ve never heard Statement with a high end vinyl front end you should
Back on topic the Vertere arms are very special and could well be just what those seeking an Aro (2024) are after.
I had a similar experience when I had a Vertere SG (HB) replace my tabrizi on my Xerxes X. It was a fine combination! It would be interesting to know the tone arm works on a non-Touraj-Moghaddam designed turntable. I suspect, in some cases at least, rather well.
it sounds wonderfully organic. I often get to listen to one with a Hana ML, sp10 PS and phone stage made up by Simon, the inventor of the tonearm, playing through a big Class A perreaux into bmw nautilus, 801. hold on to you meat sack Wow! just stupid good fun.
If you read Cymbyosis post perhaps you will better understand the reason for the Javelin. It was not a blatant copy but an updated replacement to fill the void left by the exit of the Aro from the market. The Javelin was designed and produced with respect to the Aro. Going on about it being a blatant copy sort of misses the point.
Indeed - which was why Ariston sued Linn. The fact that they didn’t succeed meant that the way was clear for Linn to proceed - and thank goodness for that!
My LP12 had a PU2 and mass ring fitted when I bought it. It was a lovely arm but as you say a challenge to set up and demanded that the turntable be exactly level. But once you got into the sweet spot, this diva of an arm was fabulous.
It is a unipivot really. Touraj is just very good at coming up with these neat mechanical solutions and realised some of the practical limitations of “actual” unipivots. As I understand it, it definitely pivots around a single point in space but the support for that pivot are 3 ball bearings that give it perfect rotational freedom in all axes.
We all called and thought of the Hadcock GH228 as a unipivot, but it really wasn’t much different. It had a conical steel tip (not exactly precision machined ) resting in the centre of four ball bearings which were supported in a brass cup, set in that main 19mm aluminium cylinder. I imagine Touraj looked at that solution and thought “I can do so much better!”, and he did. If you can see how the Hadcock solution doesn’t really have the freedom it promises, and you can appreciate how all those 60 degree and 120 degree angles between the spheres add up to a kind of perfection mechanically, you can see Touraj’s solution is substantially better. It’s not a genius leap, but it’s pretty bloody good. OTOH, if you’ve got a solution that nails the entire geometric problem then you’ve got to concede an element of genius, because that happens so rarely.
He might have pinched the idea from Wilson Benesch, they used the one ball sitting on three arrangement in the ACT1 tonearm and its decedents. I think they called it a kinematic bearing, I considered an ACT 0.5 in 2008 when I wanted to upgrade from an RB300 but went for a lightly used Aro instead.
Not far off, but not quite the same. The T27s were the early, not very well known version, that looked like the Scan Speak, with what I think is a chamber behind. I’ve never actually taken one of those T27s apart so I don’t actually know what the construction is, but I got something of a hint some years back that the Scan Speak D2008 was a deliberate copy of the T27 but with a silk dome rather than the melinex. As with some other people, there’s a fairly extensive history of thievery among those Scandinavian companies which can be read about in an interesting book about the history of SEAS. They just lifted SEAS’s intellectual property - almost with government endorsement - and although there were court cases it seems they kept out of the firing line by being in a different country, albeit only minutes away.
The bass units were the same, ie. with the racetrack chassis (and their Theil/Small parameters fit the cabinet better than the later B139s) and also the top tweeter and mid were that way round, which is far better than to more visually appealing way we’re used to. Had they understood diffraction back then (I’m assuming that no one really did but I may well be wrong) and had they got the units the same distance from that top front edge, they could have made that edge completely disappear acoustically.
I don’t remember enough of what they look like in detail because I didn’t hang onto them because one of the bass units turned out to be blown and the seller took them away because he hadn’t disclosed it in the listing. In retrospect I should have hung onto them just for the insight and reminders of what people used to be after, outside of fashion. I don’t remember the side panels protruding so much vertically, but perhaps they did but it wasn’t noticed because of the grilles.
What I’d love to know from you is “Do yours also sound magical?”. I think there has always been a special quality to them that no other speaker has, or ever has had. There are, at least nowadays, plenty of speakers that are clearer or more articulate, but they don’t really hit the completeness that Isobariks did. And that magic hung around for an awful lot of years - basically until Linn decided they could redesign the crossover while knowing eff all about speaker design. Only then was the product finally killed.
Hi Christian, sadly their are not mine. I found Linn speakers went ‘a bit south’ from around 1984 on. They had less of a roguish charm as time went on and then had two separate unrelated ranges for a while - Kan-Sara-Isobarik and Index-Helix-Nexus. I didn’t like the latter range and they appeared to the basis for all future designs….hence I bailed out of Ksns and now have active DBLs.
Ps are you the Christian Thomas of Principal Designs?
Hi Martin, Those are my sentiments entirely! To the point that I’m still baffled how one can be selling the first lot of speakers and still think the second lot are good. My view is that the Index is possibly the very worst speaker ever to be lauched into the market. Since I am the Christian Thomas of Principle Design I have a certain amount of bitterness attached to this. The Index was launched at the very same price, precisely in order to blow my PD150 speakers out of the market. I wouldn’t have minded them doing so had they been beaten fair and square, but as it happened, the Linn name alone managed to do it with my sales at Grahams completely drying up, largely because Bill Livingstone wanted a job at Linn, which he would later get. I don’t know how much longer it would have lasted anyway as even at £179 retail, I was losing money on every pair, with shipping costs badly eating into the gross margin. Shipping wasn’t like it is today and I think it was costing me something like £17 to get a pair of speakers up to York, which was getting close to the price of a couple of bass units! OTOH, a little more time would have been good as, on the very day I shut it down, an order/request for a quote for 100 pairs was being typed out by a distributor in Germany - on the back of a very nice review that Chris Thomas had done. Big hmmm…
Active DBLs must be fun. I actually like Naim speakers for the most part, and I still don’t understand why the NBLs didn’t take off. I’ve heard some great sounds through the SL2s at the Naim factory, albeit through about £70ks worth of equipment! They tend to need a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite astonishing how what you initially perceive as coloration just seems to disappear entirely, never to be noticed again. It’s a bit like their cables. I think NACA5 is one of the best cables there is, and rather astonishing in what it does, but in comparison to almost any other cable out there you have to say it’s coloured, and quite badly so. Yet, after 5 minutes of listening, you can’t hear it - can’t even identify again what you just heard moments before. That’s also an interesting facet of human hearing which I cannot fathom for the life of me - and I’m fairly practiced as you might well imagine; supposed to be carrying around mental references for all the things I’ve heard. God alone knows how unreliable those are!
Are you driving your active DBLs with 250s or 500s?
Interesting comments regarding Naim speakers being coloured CT. I get exactly what you say having used SBLs for 35 years. I have listened to a few alternatives over the years thinking speakers must have improved over time. Nothing has really floated my boat and I return home to settle in with the old Sibbles…
Thank you Stuart. You and I look like we’re in the same boat - speakers haven’t improved in the last 35 years, at least not on the visceral level I’m after. There are a few that I’d like to hear that people tell me are promising, and probably should have already, but for the most part the search is disappointing.
Yes, SBLs definitely do that. For some reason I hardly get it at all with the SL2s, which is surprising as I’ve always assumed they were quite similar speakers - though I’ve never actually asked. I tend to think that people who don’t like SBLs haven’t given them a proper chance.
That’s exactly what happened to me when a frind of mine set up his Briks at my home just out of curiosity. My first impression was how coloured they sounded but after a while it did not bother me any longer. Indeed a human brain is a remarkable thing.
Hello Christian, my favourite Linn speakers were active Kans. My dealer had a lovely demo pair in Rosewood. They rarely saw the light of day, as there was little demand and they were a bit od a pain to set up - XLR sockets, Naxo 2 etc. But they were fantastic when they did come out. pity I couldn’t afford them. The active DBLs are cheery things in the correct room…or sound like wardrobes in the wrong room. Luckily I have the right kind of room. My system is mainly old Olive stuff 52/250s but with a SNAXO 362, My LP12 went years ago. On a wim I ordered an SME and initially that and the LP12 were side by side. I much prefered the SME just easier to listen to also no guru required to set it up just so. Just good tools and good eyesight.
Similarly my cuddly DBLs, some modern speakers can sound a bit clearer and a little more detailed perhaps, but the DBLs are good fun and cover their track well, Besides, I’d have to move them to sell them.
The SBL/SL2 comparison is interesting. I thought I would buy SL2s when they came out but on dem I preferred SBLs. I suspect I am in the minority on this one though.