And now for something completely different … auditioning DACs.
Our neighbor, friend, and Positive-Feedback reviewer Lynn Olson brought over two Exasound DACs for this analog diehard to sample (pun intended).
I’m a turntable designer, and many think of me as an analog only kind of fellow, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Mk II turntable series represented a shift from pivoting (rotating) armboards to sliding armboards.
After the production launch, we looked into the possibility of this sliding armboard architecture trickling down to our Mark I series turntables
The result was the Mk 1.5 conversion.
The only downside to this conversion is the sacrifice of dual tonearm capability, and we’ve recently developed a solution to this problem.
With the release of our Spring, 2019 drive system update, it seemed like a good time to trace the evolution of our motor drives.
We’ve included some details for the technically inclined, and we’ve tried to give you some insight into both our developent process and what we were trying to acccomplish.
The sonic attributes we report below echo the comments of our customers, although in many cases they describe them differently than we do.
We express our observations in terms of musical performance values where possible, and you’ll find minimal use of audiophile jargon unless there’s no other way to describe it. Read more …
Development of one product frequently informs development of another.
In the case of the NiWatt amplifiers, we needed better wire and suddenly, a new line of cables was born.
During development of the Eiger rim drive turntable, our biggest challenge was reducing noise transmission from the motor, since it’s directly coupled to the chassis as well as contacting the platter through the idler wheel.
We learned some interesting things while solving this, and the results transferred to our belt drive turntables.
I was going through my notes on the final round of cable prototypes. This was the group of cables that pointed toward the production cable, and I invited Lynn Olson over for a listen.
Since Lynn has been an advocate of cotton for longer than I, I knew he’d welcome the opportunity for a comparison.
What do polyester leisure suits have to do with hi-fi cables, why are people returning to cotton underwear, and most importantly how could anyone wear such an ugly suit?
With the number of design changes we’ve made to the NiWatt over the past 18 months, its initial release might well be called the NiWatt Mk-IV.
All of this is to say, that the design is stable and mature, and there will be no need for first year revisions (all too common with some manufacturers).
Our customers like stable, mature designs …
This morning, we mounted a customers’ van den Hul Crimson XGW Stradivarius cartridge onto a Kuzma 4Point-9 tonearm.
The agenda was to verify compatibility of this combination. Read more …
It dawns on me that we haven’t had any NiWatt updates in a while, and as we near production, it’s time to bring you up to date (stay tuned for news).
I went through photos taken at various stages of prototyping and have a bit more of the story to tell.
In part 1, we laid out a strategy for auditioning multiple tonearms and cartridges on both a Galibier Eiger prototype and our customer’s turntable (from another manufacturer).
In this post, we finalize how we adapted the customer’s existing armboard to work correctly with his mis-specified Reed 2A tonearm.
Mis-specified tonearm? Strong words, I know.
