VDH The Crimson Hard Wood Stradivarius (and comparison with VDH SE Ebony)

OK now is getting a lot of work with this special VDH cartridges. It is fun since this high end cartridges all sound extremely well, so it is really useless to say one is really better the other one.

This is another special top from VDH. Is the special edition hard wood stradivarius.

I have listened to the Stradivarius (not hard wood) and to the Special edition (ebony) and of both I have written here in my blog.

They are called stradivarius since these models use on their woods a laquer similar to the one Stradivari used for his violins. The difference between the Special edition Ebony and this one is the use of a different wood. The body  of this one as mentioned is made of an hard wood.

But something is deeply wrong. Let’s put it clear ; Stradivari would have never laqued one of his violins like this. The body of the cartridge is laqued in a very it is good when it is finished manner. Brutal brushed and not uniform. Some dust traces trapped in the laquer too… Maybe because I am Italian and even though I have not lived in Italy for the last 25 years, I have kept a certain sensibilitiy for the estetics but when I reed Stradivarius I expect a little Stradivari attitude not just a laquer spit. In a great workmanship you never have something that looks hurried up or when it is finished is better. No. Everything comes from the love of beauty. The beauty of the product that is going to be finished to be used. This field of using it covers also the use of our eyes. Of course! Our eyes use the product too. They are part of our senses.

So Stradivarius… no, I don’t accept this name. Sorry. I feel even bad about it using this name.

But does it sound like a Stradivarius? Now the fun its mine trying to write about it.

The very strange thing is that in a comparison between the Special Edition (ebony) and this one hard wood Stradivarius the lates one really sounds more like a stradivarius!

When I was much younger I had the great opportunity to be able to ear in Cremona (where the great luters where having fun ) a violist that played three different violins to make people ear the differences of their sound. The player was the same so it was not the differences in which each violin was played that made the differences in their sound. The Guarnieri sounded projected, but dense, powerful. When he played a Stradivari (I don't remember the name of this violin) the sound was more clear, like a light was coming out of it, the sound seamed to come out of it in an easier way with more shadings in its timbres expecially in the higher tone that had a very unique characteristique to be at the same time extremely clear but with a certain sweatness guiven by a special fluidity. It had less propulsion then the Guarnieri but more radiation, with this meaning that I had the impression of the sound coming from a radiationg source and with the Guarnieri from a more directional one. With the Stradivari it was like the player and the violin disappeared in a certain way or the violin swallowed the player I don't know or the player got lost in the violin? you maybe had the idea. There was less struggle in the symbiosis between the player and the instrument but part of this struggle is also nice to ear. It was beautiful to ear it coming from the Guarnieri. The player was there, the violin too and the music too. With the Stradivari there was only the music.

Or maybe the light coming out of it made the three components melding in each other. A very interesting point was that the player of this performancebefore playing said the violins sounds would be more clear to us the listeners that to himself the player. He said he could detect more the difference in the playing tactile feelings.

I could talk also of the sound of the third violins that he played that was an Amati, but for the reason of this cartridge test i will stay with the difference between a Guarnieri and a Stradivari.

Ths VDH hard wood stradivari cartridge has the kind of easines of music coming out of it with a light touch but at the same time with a certain power that the Stradivari violin has. It is clear but not cold, it is articlulated but not tight, it is transparent to the sound but never harsh. Expecially it can play everything with style. Baroque or Lou Reed singing Heroin in Rock and Roll Animal it is the same for this cartridge. It gets the right emotions out of them. The hard wood Stradivari is a soul scanner. It gets out the soul of the music it is playing. It gets concentrated to the music to the heart ofthe music. It is able to do so also because it gets out of the message things that don't belong to the music, so mechanical noises and noise floor are very very low for a cartridge. Silences are deep and made of a different density then from the other part of the reproduction and this is how it should be. Silence does not get dirty with frequencies, frequencies expande in the nature of the silence.

And then this cartridge is fast. It is very fast, but fast and agile so it is more like light weight boxer.

It could be of interest to compare the sound of this hard wood Stradivarius to the Special Edition (Ebony). Both are great cartridges but they are different. The HD Stradivarius is surely more elegant, more agile, and has more colours. The Ebony has more power, but not in absolute term. It has a more concentrated power.It is more dense in its expression of the musical energy. It is more there. The Ebony is more a Guarnieri. Maybe VDH should call the Special Edition Ebony Guarnieri? In the future he could make also an Amati... VDH The Crimson Stradivarius, VDH The Crimson Guarnieri, VDH The Crimson Amati why not!

The Stradivari as I said gets the soul of the music coming out, the Ebony the energy, the substance, the life as a more simple movement then the soul.

They are both neutral in caracter. Not warm sounding not cold sounding. The Hard Wood Stradivarius is a cool spring day, the Ebony is a cool autumn day. So the temperature is the same, let's say 16 degree but things are different.

Both are a beautiful situation to have the walk of your life. In a cool spring day there are more distincts smells, more differents colours. In a warm autumn day there are still many colours, but they tend to shade to something common. The VDH SE Ebony is like this autumn day in comparison to the SE HD Stradivarius. This last one is  more transparent is more big sounding but not more musical.

So at the end I thing the HD Stradivarius is in absolute term a better cartridge and when changing from the Ebony to the Stradivarius you are made aware of it. But after a while you remember the Ebony, its coherence and its completely unmechanical sounding way. The Ebony has a global coherence that the Stradivarius does not have. Timing, timbres and speed and attack and decays and everything else that makes the music a whole it seems coming from the same block, from the same window. The Stradivarius has more windows. It have more dynamic freedom, it is more open and big sounding. I always liked The Wall from Pink Floyd but I have never loved it. The Stradivarius playing The Wall lives you in a real total disbelieve. The Ebony not.  In complex music the Stradivarius has something really special going on. It sorts out complexity in a simple way like a Stradivarius violin would play it, with ease. In simple things you feel it would like to do something more like a predator waiting for that jump he does not have the occasion to do. The Ebony does not leave you in disbelieve neither gives you the feeling it waits something special to express itself at its best. Also in its global performance is more coherent, more on the same level whatever it is playing. You get attached to the Ebony like to a Guarnieri. I have always loved Guarnieri. But a Stradivari ,how beautiful can it sounds!

My only regreat is not having right now enough money to buy any of the two.
Actually I would like to buy both.

Oil test for LP12

The black oil is the best for the most recent LP12, other oil can do harm on the bearing and so on. How many times we have been reading these things but we strongly feel between the lines that such affirmations come out from an ideology more then from a real test. It is true I have never seen testin oil for the LP12 but a lot of discussion about it.

So I gave them a try. Like many of you using the LP12 I have been using the standard black oil without going deep to the soninc problem of the oil itself. But now that I have tried I can tell you : the nature of oil have a marked effect on the sound of your LP12! This was to be expected since it changes in a way or another the nature of the friction of the main bearing.

I have tried for this comparative the standard Linn black oil the VDH special turntable spindle oil and the VDH TLFII.

Changing from the Linn black to the VDH special spindle the difference was very marked. The high frequencies were highlighted but not in an aggressive way, the bass got very tight and the propulsion of the music grew up, yes it was pushing. The sound got closer to a Xerxes. What was lost in this clean as a wistle sound was a certain feeling of relaxation and working on timbric differentiations.

Putting the black oil back and things got back to where I was used to. Lost was the pushing force of the VDH special spindle oil but music got more organic in its presentation. 

The VDH special spindle oil is made for not very tight tollerance bearings so maybe the LP12 has a too tight tollerance for this kind of oil? Or the resulting sound is equivalent to a sound with a tighter tollerance bearing? I don't know, I just tell you about the sound it comes out of it.

Then I have changed the black oil for the VDH TLFII. 

Now things got interesting. The differences were less marked then passing from the black oil to the VDH special spindle oil; the caracter of the sound kepts its basic nature but music was really flowing better. This is very strange to expain but it was very obvious. In comparison to the Linn black oil the timbres were better differentiated without for this reason having any shift in the tonality spectrum. This was expecially evident in the reproduction of the nylon guitar strings and also in violins. Voices had just a slight more inflection in their expressivness and a slight more relaxed expression. But things were globally better.

Another extremely strange thing was that the sound got more constant. In a same LP if with the black oil there were songs that you were wondering they had been recorded in a worse way than others, with the TLFII this did not happen. I think this is because the timbre of the instruments were more complete and with this there is a wider margin of musical satisfaction even when things are less then perfect. It is like having a little bit more money. You have more margin to get to zero.

Another thing is that using the VDH TLFII I could reduce the loading of my used cartridge. If with the black oil I had felt the best loading for a certain cartridge was for example 500ohm, using the VDH TLFII I could go to 1000. It is not that 500 was not working any more, I wrote my findings using the same load for each oil,  it is just I could load less without loosing the coherence of the sound. And being able to loading less without sonic negatives can give you some advantages if not the one to be able to choose without punishment.

I think, and I could be probably wrong, that we need to load a cartridge also to compensate the vibrations coming from the rest of the playback system.

So the VDH TLFII will be the oil for my LP12. With no Tiger Paw Tranquility.

PS: I have used also the Tiger Paw Tranquility to test these different oils thinking that since the load on the bearing with it is reduced the sound of the oil could be different. And so it was! The VDH special spindle oil was surely the best. It showed the black Linn oil to produce a slight bluring on the medium bass frequencies. Dynamic contrast was better, sound was tighter but not contracted, it got closer to a Naim standard. Tight and more deep bass, hi frequencies very well contained in their harmonics structure, and more dense. Expecially the timing character was more complex, less simplified. It was more evident the contrast between the melodic flowing and the rithmic pulse. I could be able to reduce the loading of the cartridge (even get to 47Kohm!) with no adverse effect like I could do using the VDH TLFII without the Tranquility.
The VDH TLFII with the Tranquility was almost on the same level then the black Linn one. A touch too free flowing a la Luxman 70s. Loosing a little grip that the Linn oil had and that the VDH special spindle had to even a greater degree.

VDH Special spindle oil will be my oil with my Linn LP12 fitted with a Tiger Paw Tranquility.

Tiger Paw Tranquility (for Linn LP12) or a stroke of genius

Before this it was the circus upgrade. It was the circus that lowered the noise floor of the LP12 and brought it to a more modern sound. 

It is true that what people like about the pre-circus sound is understandable with the right attitude. It has a special music flow. It is nice . But it is nice in the same way an impressionist painting is nice. The lines are blurred in the surrounding space, in a structure where the division between the objects is less pronounced in favour of their inner communion with the totality. It is nice but it is not real. 

If you,  like me, are after a more realistic reproduction of the music and you have already invested a lot of money for it you cannot go after alteration but after accuracy. Maybe, and I say maybe you will fiter out bad alterations trying to keep the ones you like or that you can more easily live with. The ones that gives you what is inevitably lost during reproduction and that the most perfect transparent device cannot give you back since it is  lost. 

One day, years after the circus, It cames the Keel, a beautiful upgrade, but at a beautiful price. Another day was the turn of the Radikal, belonging to the category don’t try if you are not in the positiion of buying it if not you will suffer, very effective but also effective to have a lot less money in your bank account. So what about less expensive upgrades? Why you have to spend all of this money? The reason is simple. To spend less money you need a simple thought of simple esecution to keep cost down. And to do this you need a smart idea. A Stroke of genious: the Tranquility. A magnetic gravitational help for the LP12 platter. It is composed by two opposing magnets that repulsing each other take away some weight from the platter so it will have the same rotational mass, but less weight on the bearing. 

What it brings to the sonic picture  was easy to appreciate. Not need to put the sonar mode on your ears. The installation is quite intuitive with only one thing to be really carefull about; I will develop this last thing later.

Once mounted it is very easy to realize the sound coming from your LP12 opened up. The dynamic window streachs out in an evident way. Sound is bigger. You are immersed in the same space of the music your hifi is playing. But expecially the noise floor is absolutely lowered.

The space surrounding the instruments changes its nature. It is not of the same timbric colour of the instuments. To say it better: the instuments decay don't make the space, but the space is a real diffent entity of a different nature, dark, in which instruments extists. Without the Tranquility the space is more "noisy" is less silent in colour, it contains a certain haze and the contrast in which the instruments play of course is less evident.

But it is not just the silence of the space that is changed; also the instruments are different. 

                                     

As a consequence of this silence they are more individualized, but since the noise floor is lower their timbre is more realistic.

It is like going from a $50 cable to a $1500 one. And maybe more. It is like going from a Dynavector 17 MKIII to a XV1S.

I have tried it in three different LP12 with different arms and set up. In my very first day of listening to it I have thought that everything was better but that something was missing : a certain natural flow of the music and a slight propulsion. Almost the same thing few people say about the circus upgrade. After few days I have got back this missing natural flow. How? I have found that for this is very important the distance between the two magnets. The magnet that is to be installed on the suspended chassis has a possibility to be adjusted in its hight. You just turn it either down or up to do it. To have the best result you have to adjust it this way: put the platter with its Tranquility magnet on the subchassis magnet and when you turn the platter do it in a way that the too magnets get in friction so that they will touch each other. To do it you have to give the subchassis magnet a certain height. It is very easy to ear it. Just turn the platter and you will ear it. Then you fix the hight of the lower magnet turning it down just to the exact point when it does not touch the upper one any more; that's it. It will take 10 minutes to do it.

Earing the difference the Tranquility brings to the sound is a very easy thing to appreciate, and it is a difference of a big improvement not just a different taste.

To sum it up: with no doubt  the best LP12 upgrade for the money ever made and by far.

Great stuff!