I'm spending less time listening to music than I used to. I wonder if it's simply because I've grown older and busier. Or is it because, as some audiophiles claim, digital sound has stripped the emotion from recordings?
It all started in the late '60s, after solid-state electronics began replacing vacuum tubes all in the name of progress. A small but fanatical group of music lovers equates the death of tubes with the loss of "musicality" in recordings. Add the advent of digitally recorded CDs, and, some say, sound quality has never been worse.
To see if this is what was keeping me from my music, I spent an afternoon at Optimal Enchantment, a high-end audio store in Santa Monica, California, specializing in components that employ vacuum tubes rather than transistors. I listened through Vandersteen 3A speakers to an all-tube system of an Audible Illusions preamp and Audio Research VT60 amp, with Audioquest cables. The CD player consists of a California Audio Labs Delta transport, which spins the disc and reads it with a laser, and a California Audio Labs Sigma II processor, which converts the information to an analog signal.
I brought along some familiar CDs Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Gabriel, Seal, and the opera Carmen with Marilyn Horne for my test run. The sound was fantastic. The Cal Audio Labs gear, with tubes in the Sigma II processor, seemed to educe extra information stored on the discs, yielding a warm, natural sound that was crisp and clear without seeming artificially bright or harsh the way CDs do on so many systems. The imaging was equally superb, with each instrument's voice clearly separated from the others with incredible depth of field. It was a shocking improvement that brought me much closer to the experience of live music. Now I'm convinced. Vacuum tubes do restore immediacy to music and as soon as I can afford to add the Sigma II and transport to my system, I'll toss Madame Butterfly on the CD player and weep.
Delta CD transport: US$895. Sigma II CD processor: $750. California Audio Labs: +1 (714) 833 3040, email info@calaudio.com.
STREET CRED
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Back to the Future, Acoustically
