Napisal/-a kuzma2 » To Feb 21, 2006 1:39 pm
Tekst iz letošnje februarske številke revije THE ABSOLUTE SOUND: test Stabi S & Stogi S kombinacije:
Kuzma Stabi S Turntable with Outboard
Power Supply and Stogi S Tonearm
Chris Martens
A soul-satisfying turntable and arm from Slovenia’s Kuzma.
a b s o l u t e a n a l o g
The single quality that most defines the Stabi S
is its ability to produce deep, quiet, ever-soslightly-
warm-sounding backgrounds.
My dad, now retired, is a
mechanical engineer,
and from looking over
his shoulder throughout
his career I learned
that the field could be a strange and
wonderful marriage of art and science.
Great designers have a flair for creating
solutions where practical mechanics and
pleasing aesthetics become one, and
where invention flows freely from a
seemingly endless river of fresh ideas.
Such is the case with the turntable and
tonearm designs of the Slovenian engineer
Franc Kuzma. In fact, if you lined
up Kuzma’s products in a row they
would seem so different in concept and
execution that you might think each was
the brainchild of a different man.
Plainly, Kuzma is one of those rare individuals
who can see and solve problems
from many different angles.Interestingly, though, it is one of
Kuzma’s least costly and most deceptively
simple designs that first catches
many enthusiasts’ eyes: the minimalist
Stabi S belt-drive turntable and Stogi S
hydraulically-damped unipivot tonearm.
This elegant turntable and arm
look quite striking, but their appearance
gives only a hint of what’s in store when
listeners hear them in action.
The mission of any turntable is to
rotate records at precise and stable
speeds without introducing (or sustaining)
noises or vibrations that could disrupt
the playback process. We want
turntables to be dead quiet, and yet veteran
analog enthusiasts recognize that
there are subtle yet audible tonal-quality
differences in the background
silences that various turntables produce.
About now, you might be wondering if
silences can even have tonal qualities,
but I would argue they can and do.
(Picture in your mind the difference
between, say, the quiet of a church sanctuary
at midnight and the interior of a
warehouse at that same hour, and you’ll
grasp my point.)
The single quality that most defines
the Stabi S is its ability to produce deep,
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quiet, ever-so-slightly-warm-sounding
backgrounds that remind me of the profound
hush you hear in a concert hall,
just before the music begins. While the
Stabi S may not be quite as quiet as toptier
Kuzma models such as the Stabi
Reference or Stabi XL, it makes a highly
satisfying alternative, and at a price
point normal mortals can handle.
Performance is no doubt helped by the
outboard power-supply/speed-control
box supplied with the deluxe version of
the Stabi S that I tested. If the Stabi S’s
background silence were a color, I’d call
that color a “warm black.” By contrast,
most Clearaudio ’tables I’ve heard, and
many recent-generation VPIs as well,
seem to produce an equally deep but
colder silence that I would characterize
as an icy “blue-black” background
behind the music.
One could probably build a case for
either background color, but I prefer the
Stabi S’s rendition of silence for two
musically defensible reasons. Its warm
black backgrounds are strongly reminiscent
of those you might hear in live
music venues. I find this quality helps
promote listening for the overall gestalt
of the music, which—in my book—is a
good thing. And this is really important:
I find that the way individual notes
emerge from and then decay back into
the Stabi S’s noise floor sounds much
more natural and continuous than does
the notes-stand-out-in-sharp-relief presentation
of the colder-sounding ’tables.
Does this mean the Stabi swallows or
obscures transient information or fine
details? Certainly not. It’s just that the
Stabi S lets the information in the record
grooves unfold in a natural way, without
imparting even a hint of momentarily
exciting, but ultimately fatiguing transient
zing. There are more “lively-sounding”
’tables than the Stabi S on the market,
but in many cases I can’t reconcile
their sound with that of live music.
The Stogi S is a highly cost-effective,
hydraulically-damped unipivot tonearm
that has the ability to unleash the
strengths of top-tier cartridges such as
Shelter’s 90X—cartridges that cost many
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times what the arm does. It enables cartridges
to produce bass that is energetic,
deeply extended, and yet tightly focused.
For instance, near the opening of
“Overture—Cotton Avenue” from Joni
Mitchell’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
[Asylum], Jaco Pastorius strikes a subterranean,
thunderclap-like note on an open
bass-guitar string, and the Stogi
S/Shelter combo captures everything that
note has to offer, including its fierce
attack, richly modulated envelope, and
long, slow decay that rings with sustained
low-frequency energy. Other good
arm/cartridge pairs I’ve heard typically
can’t produce bass like this—bass that
hits with sledgehammer force, yet speaks
with vox humana expressiveness.
At midrange and treble frequencies,
the Stogi S facilitates the cartridge’s precise
and invigorating retrieval of transient
and harmonic details, while at the
same time fostering an overall sound
that is graceful and smooth. I attribute
this elusive combination of detail and
smoothness to the Stogi S’s damping system,
and it is pure magic. For me, it was
a revelation to revisit classic CTI jazz
recordings from the 1970s, such as
Freddy Hubbard’s Red Clay or Jim Hall’s
Concierto, and the Stabi S/Stogi S pair
proved a perfect “time machine,”
unlocking incredibly fine timbral and
textural details in those old records in a
way no analog rig from the ’70s could
have done. Hubbard’s trumpet and
Hall’s guitar just sound so right through
the Stogi S/Shelter pair, with details
pouring forth as from a natural spring,
without any artificial edge enhancement
to mar the presentation.
Finally, we come to my personal
favorite of the Stogi S’s characteristics;
namely, it ability to help cartridges create
rock-solid images and spectacularly
three-dimensional soundstages. Where
some otherwise good arm/cartridge
combos struggle to produce images that
stay focused or soundstages that break
* from the speakers or the dimensions
of the listening room, the Stogi
S/Shelter pair makes both tasks look
easy. I almost fell off my couch when I
first heard the huge soundstages the
Stogi S produced, and then experienced
the illusion of the near-physical presence
of instruments and performers
upon those stages.
This quality proved especially
gripping on the Quartetto Italiano performance
of the Dvorák American String
Quartet in F, Op. 96 [Philips], where
the voices of the individual instruments
rang true, not just because timbres were
accurately reproduced, but also because
the sizes (and shapes) of the instruments
were rendered with almost
sculptural precision. The sense of being
transported to the recording site was
compelling thanks to a myriad small
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More on the Stogi
The Stogi S arm is a simple yet
effective unipivot design with
a downward-facing spike that
rests in a bearing cup whose pivot
point is located in the plane of the
record, minimizing warp-induced wow.
The bearing cup is positioned in the
center of a basin that gets partially
filled with silicone-oil damping fluid
upon which the understructure of the
arm “floats.” The arm features two
brass counterweights slung beneath
a small tail-shaft; users rotate one or
both of the eccentrically mounted
weights for basic azimuth adjustments,
or adjust a weighted trimscrew
for finer azimuth tuning. The
Stogi S provides a simple anti-skating
mechanism that audibly improves
cartridge tracking. CM
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The Stogi S is a highly cost-effective, hydraulicallydamped
unipivot tonearm that has the ability to
unleash the strengths of top-tier cartridges.
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spatial cues that suggested I was in a
space whose acoustics differed from
those of my listening room. And the
performers sounded eerily present and
alive, in part because the arm/cartridge
caught subliminal details that captured
the players moving in their chairs as the
performance progressed. The point is
that the Stogi S helps cartridges do
many small things well, and that
together those small things add up to a
heightened sense of musical realism—a
greater willingness on the listener’s part
to suspend disbelief and simply get lost
in the music.
Where does the Stabi S/Stogi S fit
in the broader spectrum of available
’table/arm combos? At $3300, the
Kuzma slots in neatly between two
likely competitors, VPI’s $2500
Scoutmaster and $5500 Super
Scoutmaster. Because the Stabi S ’table
and Stogi S are minimalist designs it’s
easy to miss their underlying sophistication,
but a side-by-side comparison
between the Scoutmaster and the
Kuzma pair proves revealing. The
Scoutmaster starts out with a price
advantage, but to get it to match up
evenly with the Kuzma rig you’d need
to add VPI’s $999 outboard SDS power
supply (the Kuzma comes with an outboard
supply), an aftermarket “drop
counterweight” for the VPI arm (the
Kuzma has “drop counterweights”), a
dust cover (the Kuzma has one), and
interconnect cables to connect the VPI
to your phonostage (the Kuzma features
generously long cables whose
“wires run in one uninterrupted piece
from the headshell to the RCA plugs”).
The closer you look the more value
you’ll see in the Kuzma combo. And
consider this: If you set aside the
$1900 you’d save by buying the Stabi
S/Stogi S instead of VPI’s brilliant but
costly Super Scoutmaster, you’d be well
on your way toward the price of a statement-
class phono cartridge such as
Shelter’s 90X.I thoroughly enjoyed the time I
spent with the Kuzma Stabi S/Stogi S,
and I’m not looking forward to the day
when it must be returned to its U.S. distributor.
I’ll admit that I was skeptical of
the design at first (I kept look at the
’table and thinking, “Where’s the rest of
it?”), but the Kuzma’s quiet, clear, and
natural sound soon won me over, as did
its ability to tap the enormous performance
potential of top-tier phono cartridges—
something not all ’table/arm
combos in this price range can do. But
maybe the most telling observation of all
was that, when I started spinning LPs on
the Kuzma, I never wanted my listening
sessions to end, which is why I gave the
Stabi S/Stogi S a TAS Golden Ear Award
in this issue. &
D I S T R I B U TO R I N F O R M AT I O N
THE MUSIC.COM
(800) 457-2577, Ext. 22
kuzma.si
themusic.com
Prices:
Stabi S turntable, $2400;
Stogi S arm, $900
SPECIFICATIONS
Kuzma Deluxe Stabi S turntable
Description: Suspension-less belt-drive
turntable with outboard power supply
Speeds: 33.3 and 45rpm, electronically
controlled
Kuzma Stogi S tonearm
Description: 9" hydraulically-damped unipivot
tonearm with adjustable VTA,
azimuth, and anti-skating mechanism
ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT
Linn Sondek LV-12/Ittok LVII
turntable/arm; Shelter 90X and Benz
Micro ACE “L” phono cartridges; Musical
Surroundings Phonomena phonostage;
Supex SDT-722 cartridge step-up transformer;
Musical Fidelity kW500 integrated
amplifier; Rogue Audio Metis preamplifier;
NuForce Reference 9 and Channel Islands
Audio D-200 monoblock power amplifiers;
Magnepan MG1.6 and Monitor Audio
Silver Series RS6 loudspeakers; Cardas
Neutral Reference and PNF Audio
Icon/Symphony interconnects and speaker
cables; RGPC 1200S power conditioner
FK
