in this issue

Titanium/Lamm hangs on to something
like the long reverberation of the tamtam
in the Decca recording of Henze’s
charming ballet-cum-flute-concerto The
Emperor’s Nightingale [L’Oiseau-Lyre] is
something to marvel at. Its midband is,
as noted, much more gemütlich than previous
Clearaudio I’ve auditioned,
though not overly warm after the fashion
of a Koetsu or gravy-rich-and-thick
like a Shelter. On a superb cut like “All
My Trials” from Peter Paul & Mary’s In
the Wind [Warner]—a record that really
ought to be reissued by someone—it
comes as close to making voices and guitars
sound in-the-room-with-you there as
anything I’ve heard from any source.
If the Titanium has added new layers
of musical detail to my front-end setup,
the $6990 Lamm Industries LP2 Deluxe
phonostage has preserved them intact.
To be honest it has taken me a very
long time to appreciate the virtues of the
LP2 Deluxe. When I first got it—several
years ago, now—I thought it was too
polite, too lacking in bloom, too dark
and lifeless. Why, then, did I use it?
Because it was also, and in spite of these
serious deficiencies, dead quiet.
Vladimir Lamm lives and works in
Brooklyn, where RFI is a genuine problem.
Unlike certain other designers of
phonostages, who seemingly live on
mountaintops far from urban broadcast
towers and who simply don’t appreciate
how irritating it is to listen to an LP
while a radio program intermittently
drones on in the background, Vladimir
feels your pain. Thanks to what is
unquestionably the best step-up transformer
around (the unit is made by
Jensen Transformers) and elaborate RFI
filtering of the AC voltage, he has seen
to it that I don’t have to “tune out” some
evangelist praising the Lord over the airwaves
while Messaien praises Him after
his own fashion on the turntable.
Generally step-up devices rob you of
transparency, and they do this at the very
first link in the Great Chain of
Reproduction, which means there is no
way of compensating for what’s been
lost. I don’t know what’s different about
the Jensen transformer, but it is phenomenally
transparent, and, since it isolates
the signal from RFI/EMI contamination,
phenomenally quiet.
The step-up transformer aside, you
wouldn’t think that the LP2 would be a
world-beatingly low-noise component,
as it is all-tube save for one solid-state
regulator for the heater supply.
Vladimir, who likes to do things differently,
makes a superb solid-state
linestage preamp, the L2 Reference; for
reasons only he can explain, he turned to
Western Electric 417A/5842 triodes for
his phono preamp. You might think this
would soften the sound and grunge it up
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