Company Address: P.O. Box 159, Ozone Park, N.Y. 11417, USA.
Anyone who regards high-end audio as a seat of cultism probably finds it difficult to understand why so many audiophiles still place so much emphasis on assembling the best phono front-end rather than getting the best Compact Disc player. Audiophiles who put technical specifications before actual sound may also find this difficult to understand, since, in terms of virtually all technical tests, the cheapest CD player wins hands down over the best phono front-end.
Further, it is possible to buy, for less than $200, Japanese direct-drive turntables that have superb wow, flutter, and rumble performance and come complete with arm and full automation.
Test results of some low-priced turntables may approach or even surpass those of some turntables costing over $1,000. The inexpensive models may also offer more operating convenience, with features such as automated track selection and remote control.
The phono connoisseur's response is threefold: First, the issue just isn't as simple as the CD player versus the turntable, it is also one of the availability of music. Fifty years, more or less, of analog discs are available, while (with the exception of a few classic performances) CDs offer only what has been pressed in the last three years. What's more, many CDs are already unavailable because their initial pressings have been sold out.
Second, some audiophiles who can afford both top-ranking CD players and the best phono systems feel that the latter still sound more musically natural and exciting. Good as today's best CD players are, the audiophile who can afford to spend more than $1,000 for a CD player and another grand for a turntable system very often comes to prefer the turntable. So my experience runs.
Finally, most folks who give a serious listen to the top-grade turntables (equipped with a suitable arm and cartridge) from such companies as Goldmund, Oracle, Merrill, Linn, SOTA, or VPI find that they sound far, far better than the competition priced at the rock bottom. Even if the bargain-basement turntables do offer myriad automatic niceties, true high-enders so rarely skip tracks that saving a few moments of manual operation is scarcely worth the loss of sonic performance. Indeed, serious high-end listeners draw the same conclusions about the moderate priced turntables from, for example.
Acoustic Research, Ariston, Dual, Rega, Sonographe, Systemdek, and Thorens. Which is to say that these turntables, costing but a few hundred dollars, offer an extremely important alternative to both the "break the bank" turntable and any CD player. Such turntables, including tonearm and phono cartridge, offer the high-end audiophile with less than a Monte Carlo budget truly good sonic performance at price points anywhere from $200 on up to $800 or so.
The VPI HW 19-MKII is a good case study in the advantages of a quality turntable. It is a fully mature design, the result of years of painstaking development. While it is not cheap, it costs $885 without any frills or accessories, I have heard only one turntable at any price that is clearly sonically superior, the improved SOTA Star Sapphire with the new Vacuum Acrylic Supermat and Electronic Flywheel--and this combination costs more than twice as much as the VPI. Good as other leading competitors may be, they do not clearly outclass the VPI HW 19-MKII, and one of them costs 15 times as much! This makes the HW 19-MKII as good a test as any of what a top-quality turntable can do. In a really good system and with top-quality records, you can hear the air, sweetness, low-level harmonic detail, and natural sound stage that many audiophiles feel is missing from most CD players and most CDs.
You also will hear just how close a good turntable can come to equaling the speed and pitch stability, accuracy of timbre, and background quietness that are the strengths of the CD player.
A few hours of actually listening to music of the same performance on both CD and analog record may well resolve any uncertainties about the two technologies and the conflicting views of various reviewers. After all, it is your ears and your taste in music that count.
An especial strength of the HW 19MKII, relative to its mid-priced competition, is that it does not produce background noise. In fact, records seem to have less background noise on the MKII than on the most expensive turntables. The HW 19-MKII is also very dynamic. Many competing turntables seem to slightly dull the music; this gives more apparent prominence to turntable and phono noise and heightens the gap between the dynamic range of most records and that of the best Compact Discs. If you have not listened to a top-quality turntable before, you may be surprised to hear how "live" the HW 19-MKII sounds, compared to most turntables, and how much of the noise you take for granted as being inherent on records seems to disappear.
The HW 19-MKII is also superior to most turntables in that it does not emphasize or recess any part of the frequency spectrum in terms of overall timbre or low-level musical dynamics.
Most British turntables, for example, produce an apparent loss of lower bass information, and many American and Japanese turntables seem to emphasize either the upper mid-bass or the upper midrange portion of the musical spectrum.
The HW 19-MKII provides as much musical information for the full range of instruments and voice as any turntable I have ever had the opportunity to audition, and it does so in a musically natural way for all frequencies. It produces clean, very low bass and natural overtones, and upper harmonics with no loss of air. Best of all, the MKII does not favor one kind of music over another. It doesn't matter if you like rock, chamber music, Mahler, or a good jazz singer, the HW 19-MKII is both transparent and musically coherent for all' types of material.
Construction and Features
The HW 19-MKII is very well styled. It comes in oak, walnut, or wood-and formica finishes at its standard price of $885, in piano black for $100 more, and with an acrylic top plate for an additional $115. The standard dust cover is much more solid than that of many other designs, and an optional tall dust cover to fit the larger or more exotic tonearms is available for $40. The HW 19-MKII has an improved, heavy-duty, a.c. synchronous motor which is quieter than the one used in the HW 19. Unlike some turntables, the MKII has enough torque to ignore groove stiction and stylus drag problems-which seem to be part of the reason why many direct-drive and low torque belt-drive turntables do not live up to the promise of their specifications. The HW 19-MKII provides consistent pitch and musical stability over the entire length of the record, and from record to record. There are none of the low-level problems with long-term speed and pitch consistency common in many lower priced units.
The platter is machined from a block of 1-inch-thick acrylic with a 6-pound ring of lead on the bottom. VPI claims that this is equivalent to a 20-pound aluminum platter. In my opinion, the VPI now does seem to have the stability and immunity to acoustic breakthrough of the most expensive two-piece Micro Seiki turntables, without their problems of sensitivity to furniture movement and vibration. The platter has also been improved, as has the belt. The grooves for the belt in the side of the platter have been eliminated; the new unit seems to run slightly more steadily and no longer has any problems with motor/platter height alignment.
Equally important, the VPI platter has a hard plastic surface similar to that of a record. Clamping a record to such a platter without any kind of intervening mat seems to do the best possible job of getting all of the music from the record, with the least possible coloration in terms of resonance and noise.
(Goldmund and SOTA also use variations of this design technique.) The clamping system in the HW 19-MKII also works exceptionally well. A hard plastic clamp, recessed in the center, screws down over the threaded spindle onto the record, and a thin, slightly cone-shaped, hard-rubber washer fits underneath the record. The end result is that the clamp locks the record down evenly over the platter, producing a very flat playing surface without any "hills and valleys" or air pockets under the record. This clamping system is surpassed only by the vacuum system in the SOTA Star Sapphire. In fact, the VPI seems to do a slightly better job of coupling the record, in a way which damps external resonance while retaining musical data, than the Goldmund, Oracle, and regular SOTA Sapphire-all of which do a far better job of coupling the record than virtually all of their competition.
It has been years since I did any metalwork on a lathe, but I still remember enough to assert that the machining on the HW 19-MKII is equal to the best competition, and is, again, far superior to most mass-produced units.
The bearing is sintered bronze at the top and bottom of the aluminum housing, with a chrome-hardened ball resting on tungsten carbide at the bottom.
I can't say whether this combination of platter, spindle shaft, and bearing is better or worse than competing bearing systems, but the VPI platter will freely rotate for an exceptionally long time. There is no audible hint of wow, flutter, or rumble-all of which are normally faintly discernible on a long-term basis in most competing turntables.
You can adjust the HW 19-MKII's bearing and platter height from the bottom of the shaft well, using a screwdriver.
This requires you to raise the turntable, but it can be a real boon when you want to make very fine VTA/SRA adjustments and are using one of the many top-quality tonearms whose height is difficult to change.
The VPI's suspension has been improved to the point where it requires only minimal adjustment to suit a given tonearm, but it is remarkably free of sensitivity to either acoustic or furniture vibration. The HW 19-MKII has a massive, 36-pound floating chassis made of two layers of 10-gauge steel, bent and welded together with a Sorbothane damping layer underneath. This floats on four springs, one at each corner, which are coupled to the chassis by point contacts similar to The Mod Squad's Tiptoes.
The frequency of the suspension is set at about 3.5 Hz. VPI claims this makes the MKII exceptionally resistant to building vibration, subsonic air-conditioning noise, and a lot of other problems. Only the SOTAs seem to be more immune to room and furniture vibrations. As for the under-cabinet, it is a well-braced unit with 3/4-inch sides. The HW 19-MKII is amazingly solid.
In short, I would rank the HW 19MKII as the high end's best buy in top quality turntables. It can take virtually any arm with a minimum of difficulty, and it is built well enough to run for years without trouble. This is the kind of component you can buy without any fear that tomorrow's new turntable design will be all that dramatically better.
Getting the Best Performance
Given this praise, the issue becomes one of how to get the best out of the HW 19-MKII in an entire turntable/tonearm/cartridge system. Good as the turntable is, you must choose an arm and cartridge of equal quality to get the benefits. In fact, finding the right cartridge/tonearm interface is one of the most important tasks your dealer can perform. It involves too many variables for a reviewer to provide the proper range of advice, although I can make several suggestions that may be helpful.
First, if you really cannot afford a top-quality tonearm and cartridge, don't buy the HW 19-MKII. "Top quality," however, does not have to mean unaffordable. Some of the best high end cartridges may have somewhat unfamiliar names, but they also do not cost $1,000 and many can be had for less than $325. Some examples include Music & Sound's Econocoil, the Grado Signature 8MX, the AudioQuest AQ 404, the Adcom XC-MR II, and the Ortofon MC 20. As for tonearms, you can get good performance for $200 to $300, and even the creme de la crème is priced below $900, affordable to some. Spanning this price range are the Souther Junior, the Premier FT-3 (available through Sumiko), the Well Tempered, Eminent Technology's Model Two, and the Dynavector DV 507. These last two will do the most to get the very best performance out of the HW 19-MKII. The important thing is to be sure that the compliance and other characteristics of the cartridge you pick match the mass of the tonearm, and that the end result blends together as a system on the VPI HW 19-MKII. You can ask your dealer to demonstrate that his recommendation produces decent results on tracking and square-wave test records, but you should also carefully listen to the assembled system, preferably at the store, before you finalize the purchase.
The tonearm mounting can be critical. The HW 19-MKII normally has a wood tonearm-mounting board, but you can buy a predrilled acrylic board for a bit more. Metal tonearm mounting plates work well with some turntables-for example, the SOTA-but with the MKII they tend to give you life and energy at the expense of hardness, a bit more resonance or noise, and exaggerated dynamics.
In either case, I would recommend getting a predrilled board directly from the manufacturer, rather than buying one from the dealer or trying to drill one yourself. VPI, like most top-quality manufacturers, tests lots of tonearms and setup instructions. Therefore, arms mounted in their boards will often be set up more accurately than even those set up by dealers who fully follow the arm manufacturer's instructions.
Also, The Mod Squad sells tapped Tiptoes which can replace the feet on the HW 19-MKII. These add an additional level of decoupling between the turntable and the furniture on which it is placed. The Tiptoes work better in reducing acoustic feedback than any of the special turntable mounting boards I've tried to date, and they are considerably less unsightly.
The VPI Powerline Conditioner If you live in an area with power-line frequency or voltage problems, if you have perfect pitch, or if you have a collection of old 78-rpm records, you should consider the VPI Powerline Conditioner. This costs another $300, but it will eliminate transient voltage variations. The Powerline Conditioner provides a stable, 125-V output with voltage inputs from 70 to 140 V, and it has front-panel frequency controls which will vary the output frequency from 50 to 99.9 Hz, within 0.02%, for a turntable speed range of about 26 to 100 Hz.
This may not sound particularly important, and in most homes it may not be. If you own a personal computer, however, you probably already have discovered how bad a standard power line can be. In my home, the Powerline Conditioner did as well as $1,000 worth of computer a.c. line filtering and power regulation, and-under worst case local a.c. line conditions--notably cleaned up the sound.
Turntable Placement
Finally, placement of a phono system is often as important as placement of loudspeakers, particularly when you are building a true high-end system.
While the HW 19-MKII is relatively immune to acoustic breakthrough and other resonances, these effects will vary from room to room and according to the room's furniture. I have heard minor improvements from moving the VPI a few inches on a cabinet surface, and keeping one's turntable out of a room-effect area is simply common sense. Try two or three locations and see if you can hear a difference. If you can't, the chances are that your listening room or present system location is adequate.
Committing to a High-End Turntable
If some of this advice seems a little unusual in a turntable review, it is included because I've become increasingly conscious that many dealers are turning away from high-end phono systems, and many buyers are now deciding whether to continue collecting analog records or to switch to Compact Discs. A good part of the mail I receive deals directly or indirectly with CD versus phono, and all too much of it reflects the fact that either the reader has never really heard a top-quality turntable/tonearm/cartridge combination or has been unable to get the advice needed to buy one in a properly set-up form.
This is a critical reason you should listen in depth to the HW 19-MKII and your choice of cartridge and arm before you buy. Your total phono system, with the VPI, will cost at least $1,500 and possibly over $2,000. At these prices, your dealer should be able to demonstrate that you can get a system that equals or surpasses Compact Disc. My guess is that a really good dealer will have spent a long time getting good combinations together, and you will not have to rely on the word of a reviewer or worry about the theories or technical claims of pundits or manufacturers. I would also guess that with a little patience, you may be amazed at just how much extra musical pleasure you will experience when you listen to a turntable as good as the HW 19MKII.
-Anthony H. Cordesman
(Source: Audio magazine, Jan. 1987)
Also see:
Well Tempered Turntable (July 1988)
Well Tempered Tonearm and Van Den Hul MC-One Cartridge (July 1988)
= = = =