Specs & Pricing

The Cutting Edge
compressor is best stored in a separate room,
with the air piped to the bearing via thin
(4mm) PVC pipe. 3
The Walker Proscenium Black Diamond
turntable is fitted with an entirely different
arm/spindle assembly than the Walker
Proscenium Gold (thus the new moniker).
Gone are the small-diameter carbon-fiber
arm-tube and carbon-fiber spindle of the
Gold; in their place are a small-diameter armtube
and spindle made of an entirely new,
expensive, proprietary material—some sort
of ceramic-composite that is said, by Walker,
to be twenty-times stiffer than the carbonfiber
arm/spindle and so hard it can only be
cut with diamond bits. Whatever this mystery
material is, the new arm and spindle have
made a huge improvement in the sound of the
Walker ’table (and the Proscenium Gold was
scarcely low-fi to begin with).
There is one other difference between the
Kuzma and the Walker that I might as well
point out right now: The Kuzma Stabi XL
turntable and Air Line tonearm comprise
the most beautifully machined, professionally
finished, and intelligently ergonomic straightline-tracking
record player I’ve seen or played
with. While the Walker is also beautiful and
beautifully made, if high-tech sexiness and
ease of adjustment are your first priorities,
then this contest is over before it starts. The
Kuzma wins.
Before I turn to the sound, let me tell you
how I tested the ’tables. First, using the same
discs, I compared the Kuzma and Walker
to each other and to the sound of the real
thing in a real space (as I hear it). I made no
attempt to determine which ’table was more
“faithful” to what was on the mastertapes.
I’m not equipped to do that; plus, tapes sound
different than vinyl. Second, I used identical
cartridges (the Air Tight PC-1) in both arms,
set at the same tracking force and as near as
I could come to the same VTA. All other
equipment—from phonostage to preamp to
power amp to loudspeakers—remained the
same for both ’tables, as did the loading of
the cartridges. Third, both ’tables were seated
Air Tight PC-1 Cartridge
I’ve been recommending the cartridge I used in this shootout, the PC-1 from the Japanese firm
Air Tight, for some time now and gave it an Editors’ Choice Award in Issue 165.
What makes this moving coil so special—and the first thing you will note about it if you listen
to any music with plucked strings or piano played staccato—is its astonishingly realistic transient
response. The pizzicatos and sforzandos I talk about on the Schnittke piece wouldn’t have been
nearly as lifelike through either ’table/arm were it not for the PC-1, which is audibly faster than
anything else out there (including the super-quick and still very worthy London Reference).
There is a reason for this. The PC-1 is the end product of a good many years of research and
development. Designed by the legendary Y. Matsudaira, who was largely responsible for some
of the great designs from Koetsu, Miyabi, and others, the PC-1 is an extremely low-impedance
(2.5 ohms at 0.6mV output) moving coil. Its low internal impedance (opposition to the flow of
current) was achieved, in part, by completely rethinking the cartridge’s magnetic structure and
the materials it is made of.
After years of research, Matsudaira and his colleagues developed a high-µ core and winding
material (designated SH-µX) that is said to have three times the saturation flux-density and
initial permeability of conventional high-µ core materials. In plain English, the PC-1’s magnets
saturate more quickly at much higher levels with fewer losses, greatly increasing the sense of
“energy” we hear through our loudspeakers.
But it isn’t just energy that gets a boost. Resolution is increased in all regards—and noise and
coloration greatly lowered. Details are clearer, air is more audible, dynamics are more lifelike,
stage width, depth, and height are phenomenal, and “action” is, too.
Available through Art Manzano at AXISS Distribution, the PC-1 is already a hit among
audiophile cognoscenti. One listen will tell you why. The PC-1 isn’t
simply a flavor of the month or a slight improvement over
what came before it; it is a leap forward in moving-coil
design. And well worth its $5500 asking price.
(Load it between 200–1000 ohms—at 47k, the PC-1
can lean out timbre and be a mite aggressive on top. And
track it between 2.03 to 2.11 grams.) JV
on top of the same
massive platform—
Lloyd Walker’s 450-
pound, rock-maple,
shot-loaded, Valid-
Point-tipped Prologue Reference equipment
stand—which was carefully leveled, fore
and aft. The only variable in setup—and
it was unavoidable—were the tonearm
interconnects. The Kuzma comes with singleended
Cardas interconnects hard-wired to the
tonearms leads; the Walker has RCA outputs
at the back of its plinth, to which you attach
interconnects of your choice (in this case,
Tara Labs “Zeros”).
Since both record players showed the same
sets of virtues on every record I played—no
matter what kind of music or how large the
ensemble—I am going to try something a
bit different in this review. I am going to talk,
primarily, about how well each turntable let
me hear one representative piece of music,
Alfred Schnittke’s Quasi una sonata [EMI]—a
brilliant post-Modernist caprice for violin
and piano that is extraordinarily dynamic,
extraordinarily rich and nuanced in tone color,
and extraordinarily well-recorded.
First a bit about the piece itself. In Schnittke’s
words, Quasi una sonata “is a report on the
impossibility of the sonata in the form of a
sonata.” It begins with a tremendous crashing
G minor chord played sforzando (suddenly, with
great force) on the piano, followed after a long
moment of silence by a rippingly dissonant
chord played sforzando on the violin—tonality
and atonality (the twin poles of twentiethcentury
music) deliberately pitted against each
other at the top of each instrument’s voice,
like a shouting match between, say, Samuel
Barber and Arnold Schoenberg.
As the piece goes on, these two kinds
of music are stated and restated at
different dynamic levels and with different
articulations, like the “themes” and tonal
centers of a traditional sonata. Yet despite
constant attempts to set them in joint musical
motion—including an adagio ironically
based on the classic B-A-C-H motive and a
fugue also ironically based on the classic B-
A-C-H motive—the two musics refuse to be
reconciled. No matter how loudly or softly
the instruments play or what manner they
play in—and they are played in every form of
staccato and legato known to man, making for
a stunningly virtuosic sonic exercise—musical
momentum keeps breaking down.
To make musical sense of Quasi una sonata,
a record player has, first and foremost, to
capture realistically the unusual timbres that
are at the heart of this argument between
the tonal and the atonal; while doing this, it
110 December 2006 The Absolute Sound