Upgrades, extensions and experiments

About three months passed uneventfully after the purchase of the Cambridge Audio + Wharfedale system. I listened to music almost every day, sometimes for two or three hours after dinner, losing sleep and feeling drowsy the next morning. Then we began to look with longing at our pile of cassettes.

Enter the Nak

We had not had the money or time to look for a cassette deck when we had bought our latest music system. So we now went asking Jacob Koshy and others whether cassette decks were available. Some friends had double-well cassette decks from Denon and others, with neat features like auto-reverse and auto-search for track gaps. What these decks did not have is good sound. By then, I had grown used to how good sound was irrelevant to my friends.

Jacob Koshy of J&B Sound then revealed to me that he was a closet addict of a brand I had only faintly heard of till then: Nakamichi. He said that he loved Namamichi decks more passionately than any of the other gear he dealt with. And of course, Nakamichi decks meant used decks: the new ones had sky high prices and were not half as good, he said. He had a 682ZX with him, would I be interested?

I hesitated. He was offering me the 682ZX for eighteen thousand rupees, while he also had a brand new Yamaha cassette deck for twelve thousand. It even came with a remote control. Should any sane customer pay 50% more to buy a 20-year-old deck which was not in production and whose parts would be rarer than, well, hen's teeth? It took me many days of listening, using my own cassettes and Jacob's headphones, to see what he was talking about. I must admit that my ears took time to even learn to detect the differences --- I was not confident at first that the differences I was hearing were real. But at the end of two or three listening sessions, I began to see that a tape recorded from a CD sounded almost unchanged when played back on the Nakamichi, and sounded rounded-off and dull on the Yamaha. What was worse, if I recorded the tape on the Yamaha and played it back on the Nakamichi, it still sounded better than the Yamaha's own playback. I could see that I was in the presence of a greatness I hadn't been aware of. The Nakamichi could almost make a recording on a metal tape sound indistinguishable from the original CD.

I had grown up all my life with the indoctrination that cassettes equalled poor quality. It is understandable that I took time to believe my ears. But I did.

When I made up my mind, and convinced my wife about the 682ZX, it had been sold. So I went back to Jacob, asking whether he had anything else. He said he had a ZX-9, for twenty thousand. I heard it, saw it, and operated its controls. I studied its front panel, with its detailed fine-tuning options for bias, level, and azimuth, and realised that this was a deck superior to even the 682ZX. I pulled out some more money from my savings, paid Jacob, and brought it home.

Then came my next revelation. I began to discover that I liked listening to music on the Nak more than on my CD player. I could not identify why, and I still can't. The preference holds true even today. However, having connected with other Nak-lovers on the naktalk mailing list, I began to accept that this is a widely observed phenomenon among owners of good Nak and Studer Revox cassette decks. The best cassette decks have worse paper specs than a good CD player, but are more enjoyable to listen to. They have a smoothness which a CD player does not seem to have, while losing nothing in areas of detail and resolution, specially with good chrome and metal tapes.

I began to demonstrate this piece of fairy dust to my friends. I would record a CD onto chrome or metal tape in front of them, and then carefully synchronise the playback of the tape and the CD, so that both players were playing the same song almost in lock step. Then I would switch between sources, and ask them to detect which source they were listening to. They would be wrong almost 50% of the time, making it clear that they couldn't hear a difference.

When I think about it now, I know that the limitation was partly the speakers I had. The Wharfedales will win no awards for accuracy and detail. However, it remains an astonishing fact that a good Nak can bring the listening experience to this level, sometimes equalling, often surpassing the pleasure of CD playback.

March 2001 became October 2002. My wife and I visited Singapore on a vacation, and stayed with my close friend Sanjeev and his family. Whatever I've described below culminated in some purchases there during that visit.

Cables

This is a very short story, but it needs to be told, like a US president admitting that he did drugs in college. I experimented with interconnects, having read all the stories people write in audio magazines. So I bought one pair of Van den Hul "the Source" and another pair of Van den Hul "The Bay C5". We brought them back home, and tried listening to the differences in the sound when we swapped these cables in place of the ones Jacob Koshy had soldered for me using good coax stock and Monster-lookalike gold-plated Indian RCA plugs.

We could not hear any difference. And we also read what Rod Elliott, Seigfried Linkwitz, and other veterans were saying about the "sound of cables". So we have just closed the chapter of interconnects for the foreseeable future. This is one area where I will not be spending any additional money in the next few years. Damages done so far: about USD 120 for the two pairs of interconnects. Those interconnects are still being used in my system, but not as any special components.

The CD player upgrade

We had been thinking that a good CD player would be nice to have, in place of the Yamaha. Our suspicions became hard fact one day when we took our CD player to Jacob's showroom and he set up a 20-year-old Sony CD player, from their ES range. This player used to be one of the definitive models in the mid-eighties, and used to retail for $2000. He had purchased this old Sony, with wood-panelled side walls on its chassis, from someone, and was willing to sell it for twenty-five thousand rupees. We wanted to see whether there were any audible differences between our entry-level Yamaha and this Sony. We frankly told Jacob that it was unlikely that we'd find the money to upgrade, but we wanted to educate ourselves. Treating us as valued ex-customers, he graciously set things up.

His shop had a really good Jeff Rowland Consonance preamp and a solid-state Class A power amp whose make I forget. The Consonance retails in the used market for $1500-2000 today --- just Google for it. The speakers were some good floorstanders made by Cadence, with amazingly natural voice reproduction. Cadence is India's only serious high-end audio manufacturer with a good international brand positioning; their Canasya valve monoblock amps retail in the US for $25,000 each.

We had carried some CDs with us. We played some Hindi film songs and some jazz. The difference was subtle but clearly audible. We could clearly hear more detail and a smoother, more natural rendering of vocals from the old Sony, together with a touch more warmth. If I were to describe it today, I'd say that the Sony player had a smooth sound approaching what I get from my Nak and cassettes.

We left the showroom that morning, carrying our Yamaha player and CDs back, firmly resolving to look for a better CD player whenever we could find the money for it.

In October 2002, in Singapore, we went looking for a good CD player, and finally picked up a DVD player from one of the shops in Sim Lim Square. This was the Sony DVP-NS900V. It is better than the old Yamaha, though the difference is less obvious with the Wharfedales than with a good pair of speakers. If you search on the Net (we did) you will see that the general consensus among music lovers is that this CD player is an amazing bargain at the price for serious music lovers: here's one review from TNT Audio. And it has two very good additional qualities. Firstly, it is almost totally unaffected by scratched CDs. CDs which simply refuse to play on other players, and jump and skip all over the place, continue to play smoothly and often without a bit of dropout on the Sony. Secondly, this Sony can do SACD.

We are currently happily set up with this Sony DVD player, the Cambridge Audio amplifier set, and the Nakamichi ZX-9 deck. The speakers, which till now have been the Wharfedales, will soon be replaced by the Asawari, till I can make something better. On the speaker front, I am quite sure that I will have a series of speakers now, and all of them will be designed and made by me. My amplifier and signal sources are not in as desperate need of upgrades as my speakers, so I think I'll be able to address this problem quite rapidly, now that the Asawari has proven to be a very listenable and superior alternative.