Roksan Xerxes
This review first appeared in High Fidelity magazine in 1990
Inspector Morse used a Roksan to enjoy his music.
The Xerxes has established itself well in the past five years or so and much has been written about its unconventional modus operandi. Shunning the convention of a sprung sub chassis the deck features a top and bottom plinth, separated by adjustable rubber isolators. The whole assembly is encased in a wooden surround. The top plinth houses the main bearing, two-part alloy platter and tone-arm, and the motor is affixed to the lower plinth. Its pulley protrudes through a hole in the top plinth to belt drive the platter. Unusually, again, the motor is mounted on a spindle, free to rotate slightly under the restraining influence of a small spring.
Most users, however, will only be concerned with any operational differences and here the Xerxes has but one: after placing a disc on the platter a small portion of the centre spindle is removed to divorce the main bearing from the record. This also allows for correction to be made for discs with off-centre holes.
Power for the deck comes from an outboard supply box, which also feeds the Artaxerxes amplifier. Two speeds are available at the touch of a button. The box runs rather warm and should be sited to permit air flow for its ventilation.
The Artemiz arm exhibits Roksan’s trait for ignoring convention. All seems normal until one checks out the counterweight. The company call it “intelligent”. Briefly, accepting the fact that no records are perfectly flat, the device is designed to compensate for inevitable changes in tracking force as the arm rides over record warps. The Artemiz looks finnicky but is no trouble to set up or handle. Use of the lift/lower device is virtually obligatory as the headshell has no finger lift.
Shiraz is Roksan’s moving coil cartridge. It has a line contact stylus and in true moving coil fashion likes to track at highish downforces (between 2 and 2.5 grammes is recommended). Don’t worry: a cartridge staying securely in the groove at 2 grammes will do less damage to your records than one which chatters and mistracks its way round at a lighter force.
The last part of the set-up is the Artaxerxes cartridge amplifier. Fitted inside the deck this boosts the fragile output of the cartridge to line-level before the signal has to wend its way to the amplifier. It’s an idea I’d like to see adopted by more manufacturers. A word of warning, however: do not plug the output from such a device into the `phono’ sockets of your amplifier. Select a spare tape, tuner, aux, or CD input.
The Roksan has always been a stunningly clear and detailed performer and the Artaxerxes builds on this foundation. On Rebel’s Les Elements the opening onslaught burst forth with a lack of dynamic restraint that would finish off one’s maiden aunt. The orchestra had great presence and life, and its sound didn’t want for power or scale. The Roksan’s presentation was so different from that of the PT which had preceded it, yet it was equally compelling. The Roksan’s palette of tonal colours was muted in comparison but its precision and forcefulness was unmatched.
On The Proclaimers’ track the Roksan’s ability to delineate the stopping point of one note and the start of the next rendered the music with martial precision. The two brothers’ voices were portrayed with clarity and individual character. Drums and bass guitar, which set the marching rhythm were rock solid, tuneful and incredibly tight. And their sheer power – hang on to anything in the room that’s not screwed down!
Bonham’s drumming on Led Zep’s Moby Dick was blessed with wallop and good timbre across the kit. Cymbals had character and good decay. The thwack of the beater on the bass drum skin was conveyed with marked credibility. And bass guitar was simply cavernous: bags of clout but, again, strictly controlled. The track had an overall energy that excited a physical response from the listener.
The Roksan isn’t all about power and weight: it does a nice line in subtlety too. The breathing of the flautist on the Rebel recording, and the light touch of Bonham’s fingers on his kit in Moby Dick were captured well, but the PT and the LP12 just had the edge in this respect, painting a slightly more detailed picture of what was happening. But we are talking here about very slight differences indeed.
On master tape comparisons the Roksan showed a slight loss of openness and a noticeable bass boost. Like the Linn it seemed to add mild euphonic coloration and remove some of the sense of air and spaciousness from the sound, reducing clarity a shade. Again we’re talking slight aberrations. It retained the character of the music, and lost very little information.
The Xerxes is without doubt a top notch performer but it won’t be to everyone’s taste. I would suggest that it is one component where a lengthy audition is mandatory. Some listeners found that their initial reaction to its presentation altered significantly after continued exposure.
