Test gramofonu Spiral Groove SG 1.2 w The Absolute Sound
Jacob Heilbrunn
A Groovy Performer
When I was a teenager growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, I often made a beeline to a store called National Record Mart. In those prehistoric days, the shrinkwrap on the LPs meant that a pre-purchase test run wasn’t really possible. There I would disburse some of my hard-earned dollars from my paper route for classical or jazz LPs, then race home to play them on the family Dual turntable, which hailed from Germany’s Black Forest region. I listened with rapt attention—and sometimes with disappointment to a recording that wasn’t up to snuff. So when digital appeared in the early 1980s, my impetuous teenage self welcomed the demise of the LP. The future had arrived, or so I thought. I distinctly remember hearing the local WQED classical radio station play its first digital CD, a recording of Beethoven’s crowd-pleaser “Wellington’s Victory,” and announcing to all and sundry that the disc was the cat’s meow. My father, however, took a different view. An inveterate fuddy-duddy, he disclosed to me years later that he had visited the downtown National Record Mart to scoop up a bunch of vinyl that was being sold at dumping prices. Unlike me, he was always unmoved by the claims of a revolution in recorded sound, raising his eyebrows questioningly when I touted the obvious virtues of the new digital era.
Flash-forward to today, and the verdict is rather obvious: My old man had it right all along. He’s using a VPI Scout these days, and I’ve become what you might call a vinyl recidivist. On recent trips to Paris and Berlin, for instance, I made sure to pick up some choice Decca LPs as well as some gorgeous Berlin Classics 180-gram reissues that were originally recorded in East Germany (Chad Kassem’s Acoustic Sounds also carries several of the Berlin Classics). It’s my sense that for the first time, audiophiles are really able to tap into the true potential of what engineers captured in the grooves decades ago. The quality of playback has advanced so rapidly—whether it’s cartridges, tonearms, or turntables—that it’s riveting to hear how far the boundaries of music reproduction can be pushed, as well as to discover what can be produced at less-than-Olympian price levels.
Enter the Spiral Groove SG1.2 turntable. In contrast with the cost standards of the six-figure turntables floating around out there—including a spanking-new Air Force Zero that’s pegged to come in at a cool $350,000—this new ’table from Allen Perkins is not priced in the stratosphere. It retails for $30,000 sans tonearm and for $36,000 with his Centroid ’arm (for those of you with an SG1.1, your ’table is fully upgradeable). Mind you, as the owner of a Continuum Caliburn, I’m hardly in a position to knock the battleship approach to turntable design, nor is that my aim. What I’m trying to say is that Perkins has deployed his fertile mind to provide as much value as possible in a relatively small package. In fact, I would say that his turntable is rather deceiving, as it packs a far greater sonic punch than you might expect from a casual look at it. What’s more, Perkins, an accomplished drummer and gifted designer of audio equipment, is a patient and mild-mannered soul who is less than inclined to make a fuss about the merits of his gear. It is only when you take a closer look that you begin to appreciate the effort and care that went into designing and producing the tonally pure Spiral Groove.