5196105905

Cueing is accurate. damped in both di-rections. and operable with ihe dusi cover closed.

The tumtable’s only major disad-vantage, besides its lack of automatic shutoff. is its relatively ineflective sus-pension. This is easily and cheaply reme-died with the poor mans auxiliary turn-table base: a piece of one-inch siatę or paving stone resting on three inches of open-cell foam rubber (about $17: foran extra $12 or so. you can have the slab cut from polished siatę, which looks posi-tively elegant, especially if you paint the edge of the foam dark gray).

Attention to a couple of fine points will improve the record-playing system slightly. The first is carlridge loading. The Shure has its flattest response when loaded with about 250 picofarads. but the tumtables signal leads and the re-ceiver’s input together provide only about 150. Adding the capacitance of a three-foot extension cable and mating female-to-female adapters (about $6 to-tal) flattens the midrange and eliminates a slight top-end rise.

Alignment is morę important with the M-97HF’s line-contact Stylus than with a spherical or elliptical one. Hori-zontal tracking error can be reduced by ignoring the cartridge-alignment gauge supplied with the Technics and mount-ing the cartridge as far out in the head-shell as it will go, and tw isting the pickup slightly clockwise. as seen from above. If you don’t have a cartridge alignment protractor to aid in this process. Tech-nics* gauge will be better than mere guesswork. Yertical alignment will be good if you use the spacers provided with the cartridge. as outlined in the in-structions. and set the tracking force (with the brush in use) at 2 grams.

The overall frequency balance of this system sounds good "with master tapes. This means that some records or FM broadcasts will sound a bit too bright. The treble eon troi of the 7020 works well to reduce this effect; don’t be afraid to use it. The systenTs imaging will be best if the speakers are positioned on a wali at ear level.

At 20%off list prices. Fve presumed fairly aggressive shopping in order to stjueeze the budget a bit. I don't think Fm being unrealistic. however. My best guess at the total net retail price eomes out to $999.96. And that’s about as close to $1.000 as you can get.    E.B.M.

1,000

"The system should never embarrass you, even if you add a digital player."

i

\

Harold A Rogers: Aformeraudio editor of HF addresses the > needsof urban

03

\ audiophileswho are , ; ona moderate l budget.

This system is designed for serious lis-teners who live in apartments or other-wise find their space limited. It is chosen so that it can be upgraded with little or no replacement of the original compo-nents. and it should be equal to any and all musical demands. including those to be madę by digital audio.

For $1.000 this is a tali order, so there will be a few compromises and trade-ofls involved. The first is that I will make no attempt to inctude a tape system: second, if faced with the choice of cutting corners on the components used or sacrificing FM reception capability. Fil do the latter. Tape and FM. ofcourse. can easily be added later as part of up-grading.

To start. I would choose a pair of high-quality minispeakers. The ADS Model 300C seems like a good candidate at $300 a pair. Having a 4-ohm imped-ance, this speaker will help lis to use our electronics most efficiently. And its rela-tively high sensitivity will also allow some savings on the electronics. Staying within the 75-watt (18%-dBW) rating of the speakers will still generale sound pressure levels (at I meter) up to almost 110 dB. and. as a practical matter. the speaker could probably be pushed a bit harder for brief transients. This leaves the system ready to deal with program sources of wide dynamie rangę, such as digital recordings.

I am assuming that the listening room will be smali enough that the criti-cal distance-the distance at which the sound pressure level stops falling off as you move away from the speaker—is not substantially morę than one meter. This could be a bit optimistic. but even if we allow 6 dB of loss to cover our assump-tion the system will still pul a substantial

104 dB SPL into the room.

To drive the speakers. Fil pick the Yamaha A-550. Doubtless there are nu-merous other integrated amplifiers that would do as well. bul in this case the price ($250) is right and the output power (40 watts [16 dBW| continuous into 8 ohms for each channel) is just about adequale. Of course. because we are using 4-ohm speakers we’ll be able to squeezeout morę power than this—probably close to 80 watts [ 19dBW) per channel for short transients. And if we allow

%

«

42

HIGH FIDEUTY