The Vinyl Lovers Dilemma
Sometimes the vinyl bug digs deep and can surprise you. A case in point being a recent customer whose vinyl collection had increased substantially in recent years and his preference for the ‘black stuff’ had gone beyond what his basic, yet reliable, deck could adequately deliver. Frequently a client questions whether streaming or humble CD replay is good enough to satisfy and others who would argue that vinyl simply sounds ‘different', not necessarily better, and then there is a third kind - those who have experienced an AVID turntable.
Discovering AVID: The Best of British Engineering
AVID is familiar to some, having been around since 1995, but those who have yet to discover the delights of AVID’s impeccable British engineering and near-obsessive pursuit of quality and performance are certainly missing out. AVID is the dream of one man, made real. Conrad Mas, who in 1977 had a friend show him a home-brew turntable and who subsequently had a Eureka moment, realising that he knew how to make it sound better. Following some trials, Conrad became addicted to this ambition and formally committed to sharing his proprietary concepts with the formation of AVID HiFi.
AVID’s Relentless Pursuit of Perfection
Over the intervening years AVID has ceaselessly created turntable designs that push the envelope of what can be achieved with the medium, and nothing is left to chance. Irrespective of whether it’s the budget Ingenium PNP or the reference Acutus turntable, all parts are milled from solid blocks of raw metal to incredibly high tolerances and finished in-house at their manufacturing facility situated amongst the Cambridgeshire countryside.
Here Comes the Sequel…
Today was all about the Sequel, AVID’s highest-performance offering that sits just below the flagship Acutus. At the client’s request, we fitted AVID’s own Nexus tonearm, featuring an all-titanium construction fabricated to micron precision and paired this with the Pulsare II phono stage. The latter is a two-box AVID phono stage with impressive resolving powers and which allows every last ounce of music signal to be relayed to the amplifier.
A Revelatory Experience: The AVID Transformation
Following some fine-tuning to accommodate the customer’s own Lyra Kleos MC cartridge, we were all set to experience the results which was nothing short of dramatic. The two-dimensional soundstage was now banished to a distant memory and replaced with a rich, tactile and vibrant image that you could reach out and touch. The background recessed into inky blackness and the vocals popped into focus, not just in terms or position, but in scale and texture. Gregory Porter’s voice now had added projection, as if unhindered by the opposing instruments and took on an effortless silkiness that was weighted perfectly; neither too clipped or too laboured, but fulsome, robust and dynamically expressive in a way that just wasn’t audible before - I want to say ‘visible’, because the reality of the image recreated in the listing room was nothing short of stunning. The Sequel demonstrated holographic-like abilities that draw the listener closer to the music. It’s entirely captivating and, given where we had started sonically, not exactly a subtle change.
Shattering Vinyl Expectations
We were attempting to highlight that things could be improved with his vinyl replay and what we actually discovered was, not just a better turntable, but singularly the best way to experience music on his system - full stop!
