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Supatrac: the world's best tonearm?

Thanks for that. Interesting that a digital proponent picked a vinyl-only room in his top four. You can see that he is perplexed...
 
Why wouldn't he?;)

He answers that in the article. He said he was "100% unprepared" for what he heard in the Cessaro / Döhmann / SUPATRAC / Reed / AIRTIGHT / Koetsu / Alieno / Acustica Applicata room and that vinyl is just not his thing. The other rooms he selected had digital sources. Yet he selected our vinyl-only room in his four best of show and said some unreserved things about it, for example that it was "the most concert-like experience I’ve ever heard".
 
From the moment I met Mark Döhmann we understood each other. We are both passionate about enjoying our records to the maximum, and fascinated by the engineering problem that is the venerable gramophone record. The fact that it works at all is a miracle. The fact that it can sometimes produce results which sound, and more importantly feel like real music being performed in the comfort of your drawing room, is an enduring mystery, and one worthy of assiduous investigation.

Mark, and Ralf of Cessaro seemed to be as thrilled with the results we heard in 'H4.0 F001' as I was. It was a tricky room, and not everything sounded perfect in there, but when it came to difficult-to-track-and-control complex dynamic orchestral music, the sort of torture test which turntablists seldom dare to play at shows, I have never heard anything like it from a hifi. I agree with The Computer Audiophile when he said it was "the most concert-like experience I’ve ever heard".

I understand that Robert Harley spent considerable time in the room, which I hear is unusual, and he said this:
When I walked into the show’s largest room and saw the massive, almost cartoonish-looking Cessaro Zeta horn system, my first thought was that this odd-looking contraption could never work or sound “of a piece” from top to bottom. That prejudice was instantly dispelled seconds into the first piece of music. Simply put, the Zeta was absolutely stunning in its realistic portrayal of instrumental timbre, dynamics, imaging, and ability to conjure up the illusion of the physical presence of musical instruments. This was particularly true on brass instruments—the trumpet and sax on Basie Jam or an Art Blakey album, for examples. It was like being transported to the recording studio by a time machine.

Here's his write-up:

Note the mention of brass instrument performance. My guess is that tone-arms are critical to the credible reproduction of brass instruments, because their highly energetic sound is very often slightly mistracked. The brass instrument performance is something which thrills me whenever I listen to a SUPA, simply because it is an extraordinarily rich and exciting sound, not just because I know how difficult it is for a mechanical record player to retrieve it with the full juice.
 
I take your word for it - I'm completely out of my depth, and all this stuff is way beyond any budget I've ever been able to consider! Must. Work. Harder!
 
I'm sorry that some of my comments on this page seem to be non sequitur. It looks like the questions which they answered have been removed. Does anybody know why?
 


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