Russ Andrews
Russ Andrews holds near legendary status in the hi-fi community. The ultimate committed tweaker, eager to extract as much performance – by any means possible – from any hi-fi system, he spends much of his day at work in his R&D facility. That building, at the rear of his farmyard home, could easily double as The National Hi-Fi Museum, containing, as it does, a truly vast and wonderful collection of components from hi-fi’s early days to the present; test and pro equipment; and a similarly comprehensive library of hi-fi magazines. Setting aside my loathing of public transport, I endured a five-hour train journey to the Lake District to chat with him and to hear his system. Neither experience disappointed.
Russ at home enjoying some toonz
Malcolm Steward: Let’s begin with the obvious question – how did you get started in hi-fi?
Russ Andrews: I first got interested when, as a schoolboy, my pal took me home to show me his dad’s newly built system – a Collaro auto-changer, a Mullard valve amplifier and a Wharfedale 10-inch driver screwed to a plywood baffle leaning in the corner of the room. I heard it and thought instantly that that sound was what I wanted. I went home and immediately started to upgrade my record player: the first thing I did was to swap the horrible rubber mat it had for a felt one. It was interesting when, years later, I first met Ivor Tiefenbrun and he told me how even the felt mat on Linn’s then new Sondek LP12 was crucial to the sound. I thought: “I know. I’ve already been there and done that!”
I became thoroughly tired of the education system, left school and went into TV and radio servicing before joining GEC Telecommunications as a test engineer. I found I could do my quota of work in just over an hour each day and I soon got very bored of doing crosswords and trying to look as though I was working for the other seven hours. Then I met the lady who was to become my wife and she said she wouldn’t marry me until I was doing a job that I enjoyed: that was an alien concept to a lad from the Midlands brought up with the idea of simply taking the job that paid the most money.
That led me to going to Edinburgh as a mature student to study chiropody. (My wife is a physiotherapist and we planned to set up a joint practice.) I had to work part-time to supplement my grant and did a host of worthless jobs before becoming a service engineer in a hi-fi shop, Audio Aids, where I worked in the evenings and at weekends. Eventually, the owner asked me to go into partnership with him. That, and another partnership, subsequently led to me setting up my own retail business, Russ Andrews Hi Fidelity, which carried on after I sold my shares in it right up until last year.
Ultimately, though, I tired of retail. I found it very frustrating that manufacturers weren’t interested in my suggestions as to how they could improve their products. I can’t think why [Laughs uproariously]. I saw the job of the retailer as being someone who put together systems that played music rather than just selling a collection of five-star products. I think it’s a measure of my success in taking that approach that many of my customers today were initially customers of the shops I worked in all those years ago.
MS: When did you leave retail and start Russ Andrews Turntable Accessories?
RA: That was in the 1980’s when I moved here, to Cumbria, and we took over the distribution of Grace and Supex from Linn. That became too constricting a title so we abandoned the turntable part of the name. Now we’re simply ‘Russ Andrews’ because it helps to be that bit more general.
MS: Can we discuss the Russ Andrews’ approach to accessories?
RA: It’s not so much an approach to accessories as an approach to enjoying music from a hi-fi system. Going back to my days in retail, I thought then that the dealer’s task was to put together systems, balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the components so that they worked together and produced a coherent musical result. I’m not so sure that all retailers do that nowadays. And going back to the late 1970’s when I, quite by accident, discovered cable directionality and I read about the influence capacitors had on sound, it switched on a light bulb about a whole new area of system improvement that hadn’t been thought of before. I found that by getting cables running in the right direction I could make improvements to a system that I hadn’t been able to make any other way… because the sound of a cable running in the wrong direction has quite a distinctive ‘footprint’. It changes the music in ways that are unmistakable and consistent. That led me to look for other ways to improve the system I had. As I worked on getting more music out of that system I discovered that the improvements weren’t specific to that particular system: they worked on all systems.
Russ in his R&D room, aka the Museum of Hi-Fi
MS: Surely it’s easy to get led down the wrong path by using your own system to develop generic fixes?
RA: It is, and I have. At one stage I found that a slab of slate under my turntable improved its sound so I had some made and began selling them. I then discovered to my dismay that I hadn’t come up with a general solution but one that was particular to my system: I had a fault in my tone-arm and when I fixed that the problem went away and the slab sounded worse. But that experience led me to Torlyte: it cause me to investigate why adding mass under the turntable made it sound worse. So there was a positive outcome from that embarrassing mistake! It taught me, though, to make sure that what I sell and recommend are truly a generic solutions that work with anything.
In the early 1980s, while in America, I was introduced to mains spike filtering, which I’d not heard before, and that led me into looking at the mains supply far more, even though I’d been aware of the importance of the mains since the mid-1970s. Hi-fi would sound different on different days and at different times of the day: and everybody said that it was down to “the way that you felt.” I didn’t know what the cause was but I was sure it wasn’t psychological. And then, while repairing an amplifier, I noticed that slight variations in the mains input voltage resulted in dramatic variations in the amplifier’s output power and an increase in its distortion. So I measured my domestic mains and found that it swung between 250V and 209V, and, no surprise, the lower the voltage the worse the system sounded. It always seemed best late at night when the voltage was highest and when the Electricity Board was bringing the frequency back into line to catch up with its legal obligations over each 24-hour period.
Over the years I found many problematic mains effects that I’ve been able to cure with filters and devices, better mains cables and suchlike, but we’re still at the mercy of the Electricity Board. I can’t, for example, deal with DC on the mains but I think I’ve sorted out pretty much everything else.
MS: Is DC on the mains still much of a problem?
RA: Yes. In fact we have even more to deal with these days with things like microwave ovens and hair driers with their cheap half-wave rectifiers. People say this doesn’t matter because their hi-fi is isolated by its mains transformers but DC can effectively pass through a transformer because it causes the magnetic field to collapse. The only way round that problem, as far as I can see, is regenerating the mains. There are such devices that will work with low-demand equipment but it’s hard to build one that will supply the requirements of even a modest power amplifier.
MS: Can we discuss the way in which your ‘accessories’ are driven by the search for a more musical performance rather than a more ‘hi-fi’ performance?
RA: I have to credit Ivor Tiefenbrun for switching me on to the concepts of rhythm and timing. I’d heard them and recognised them long before I ever put a name to them. I knew what was good and what wasn’t but I didn’t fully know why, and I knew what I preferred but I couldn’t describe it. Ivor then described it as ‘rhythm and timing’ and I thought “Of course it is. Why didn’t I think of that?” That was a great moment because I then had a name for this phenomenon and a concept that I could follow. I found that if I listened to performances I’d prefer the one with the better rhythm and timing. The music was consistently better. If you put a system together with equipment that did rhythm and timing well, that system always sounded better. And if you used cables that also handled rhythm and timing well, it became a virtuous circle. If you do the right things in the right order, then you hear more and more.
MS: What exactly is the right order?
RA: Doing things in the correct order, I think, is important because you end up getting better value for money with every penny you spend. I’ve just demonstrated a system to you where I upgraded the mains cables, then the interconnects, and finally added Oak support cones under the equipment. Lots of people would say that the Oak cones were the most noticeable improvement but that’s only because I demonstrated them after doing all the other upgrades, which solved the bigger problems first. If I’d demonstrated the cones first, you wouldn’t have noticed the large improvement that you did because the bigger problems with the system would not have been solved.
One has to solve the bigger problems first because that gives you the best payback. That gives you a bigger ‘magnifying glass’ on the small problems, which then appear bigger. When you then solve those problems you get the same big payback and another big step forward in system performance. And so it goes on… I don’t see any end to it. As I find more and more problems to solve, that magnification factor gets bigger and bigger. And the pleasure gets bigger, too, because the music keeps getting better with it.
MS: We spent a long while listening to your system last night and I must say that I didn’t hear too many problems with it. How do you come across them – do your customers tell you about them?
RA: Mostly, I’m dealing with them for myself. I understand my customers’ problems because I’m a customer myself. I’m also an enthusiast and I’m driven by musicality – the rhythm and timing – and by trying to improve the way a system reproduces those elements, you can’t go wrong. I want my system to deliver more and more music, so, effectively, that system is my test bed.
I have worked at design level with components themselves, right down to building cartridges with Goldring, and that has enabled me to detect more differences. I also designed the ARC loudspeakers. When you’re listening for rhythm and timing at every level, it guides you along the right path and forces you make the right choices. So that is how I ended up with my own electronics and the loudspeakers that you heard last night, because I’m interested in getting more music out of every component in the chain.
When you start selling things to people and then listening to what those customers say you find that they’re experiencing problems that I haven’t come across. That makes you wonder how you can solve that problem, and ultimately that solution leads to a better product or advice that you can pass on to others. Gradually, with more feedback from customers, I’ve found that I’ve been solving more and more problems.
Russ at the RA factory
MS: Do you find that with customers who perhaps haven’t yet latched on to the concepts of rhythm and timing that you have to do a certain amount of re-education with them?
RA: I try not to do it that way: I prefer to ignore all the hi-fi talk because it doesn’t get anyone anywhere. We’re not trying to ‘sweeten people’s treble’ or get rid of their ‘flabby bass’, for instance. If you do the right things to improve the system, the treble, bass and ‘hi-fi’ problems will automatically sort themselves out.
On that note I ended what I felt had been an enlightening interview, in which I’d encountered a true hi-fi enthusiast who, for once, wasn’t hung up on what I believe to be irrelevant considerations but who recognised that it’s the music that matters. How wonderfully refreshing.
