Malcolm Steward: journalist

After reading my review in Hi-Fi Plus of the Well Tempered Amadeus GT turntable, importer, John Burns of Pear Audio set about investigating my couple of negative observations; one of these was my reservation about the wallwart power supply that comes with the deck, which upset the performance of my Naim electronics even when it was just plugged in to the mains power supply. This didn’t have to be running:, simply having it connected was enough to damage the sound of the system. I demonstrated this to JB when he visited and he, too, immediately heard the system performance deteriorate whenever the supply was connected. I showed him how an inexpensive Maplin’s regulated 12V supply did not have the deleterious effect that the wallwart did. Being the decent bloke he is – well, he is an Alfa driver, after all – and a shrewd businessman, he wasted no time on berating me for being a deaf ***t and simply went away and investigated the problem.

Within days, and having spoken to the Australian WT importer, Jonathan Davies, he emailed me details of a modification to the deck’s earthing that should improve the situation, which just involved undoing four allen screws and removing one length of superfluous wire. Apparently, the wire was added to just one batch of turntables because WT thought it might reduce noise with low cost switching PSUs. Take off the RCA socket strip at the rear of the turntable and cut or desolder the wire indicated in the photo. If you cut it, I suggest you make sure that any uninsulated wire ends are sleeved or taped.

I haven’t done this yet because I no longer use the original supply. However, I have performed one tweak that the affable Mr Burns suggested to me. In my review I noted how the Amadeus had turned me on to classical music – in particular, choral works – and re-awakened my interest in 1950s and early 1960s jazz recordings. I also observed that it did not have quite the same rhythmic urgency with rock that my Funk Vectored Linn Sondek displays. This was not a serious complaint: if the Linn delivered 100% then the Amadeus was dishing up 97.5% or more. It was falling short by just the tiniest smidgen.

Well. no more! John suggested that I lower the container that holds the damping fluid until about one-third of the golf-ball ‘bearing’ was immersed in the fluid rather than the half that was the original set-up. Sure enough, the WT caught up with the Linn in terms of rhythmic urgency and bounce and, I consider, surpassed it in other respects.

As a result, the Well Tempered Amadeus is now performing daily record rotating duty atop my Sunoko Vent stand with the Dynavector XX2 feeding my Naim SuperLine phono stage, and, I am happy to admit, all is sweetness and light in my world of analogue.