Ultra Audio

Call me a dinosaur, anachronistic, or snatch a bon mot from one of the uncharitable cranks who sound off on some online forums, but listening to vinyl records on a decent-quality, properly set-up turntable still provides the best approximation of real music that I have heard. There’s just something intrinsically right or more real about it: LPs sound more open, fluid, textured, detailed, dimensional, and -- this is where the magic is -- effortless than their digital counterparts.

Our number-centric brethren may point to measurements as proof of my stupidity, while others may point out that I’m just a self-deluded, middle-aged freak trying desperately to hold on to the brass pole of my youth. Be that as it may, I am not proclaiming some kind of neo-Kantian universal maxim of analog. I here state my personal bias not to start yet another donnybrook of analog vs. digital, but to provide some context for what I heard in my time with NuForce’s DAC-9 digital-to-analog converter.

Whenever I travel, I try to drop in on manufacturers, distributors, or dealers and check out what they have to offer, not only in terms of equipment, but also for their approach to audio. This past October, in New York City for a week of literary events of my own, I peeled off a couple afternoons to visit Jeffrey Catalano, owner of High Water Sound, and Wes Bender, of Wes Bender Studio NYC. Both are amiable acquaintances I’d met in demo rooms at the annual Rocky Mountain Audio Fest over the years, and I’d been increasingly curious about the lines they represent and their overall takes on our pastime.

High Water Sound is a distributor of very special audio gear, mainly imports from Europe: from Germany, the TW-Acustic 10.5 tonearm and line of turntables, Cessaro Horn Acoustics speakers, Thöress Systems electronics, and WSS-Kabel wires; from England, Aspara Acoustics speakers and Tron Electric electronics; from Denmark, Hørning Hybrid System speakers and electronics; and the Thales tonearms from Switzerland. High Water’s domestic brands include Audience, Tri-Planar, Graham Engineering, Silent Running Audio, and Purist Audio Design. Jeffrey Catalano’s specialty is analog, analog, analog -- and then some more analog. His demo rooms at RMAF feature sensitive speakers, superb tube electronics, and some of the most eye-catching turntables and tonearms around. I’d briefly visited him in New York just a month before. This time around I wanted a longer session.