Some find it early…
“Some find it early, some find it late, some never at all.” So reads the legend on a manufacturer’s freebie T-shirt my wife has just passed by me wearing. (Anyone who likes T-shirts rapidly becomes a walking billboard in this industry!)
Now I was one of those who found `it’ late. I would rather have been one of those who found `it’ early. But I’m eternally grateful that I’m not one of those who never found `it’ at all.
What is this mysterious `it’? It (I’ll drop the emphatic punctuation permanently now) is a product that has both amazed and delighted me. It has kept me from my bed at nights. It has likewise amazed and delighted visitors to my home who have heard it – or rather heard its effect upon the sound of my system. It has kept them from their beds too. Their incredulity has rendered unimportant habits like going home before the dawn in order that they might sleep before attempting work the next day.
When the designer of this astounding product came to install it in my home, one Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m., I was prepared to afford him my customary thirty minutes of polite chit-chat before politely showing him the door with my customary thanks for his trouble. I actually showed him the door with unaccustomed reluctance at 5 a.m. the following morning, after a furious listening session that saw my well ordered, LP filing system decimated in a record-playing orgy of organisational disregard. I couldn’t get those records off the shelves fast enough: and I certainly wasn’t about to waste any precious minutes putting them back in order. That could wait for another day.
That day has finally arrived; several weeks after the manufacturer in question, John Watson – maker of `it’ – strode out of my house to greet the dawn chorus with a deservedly self-satisfied grin. What could he have brought that caused this tumult of excitement and drama? A revolutionary new turntable; an innovative tone-arm; a world-beating cartridge; a better preamp or some other hideously expensive component? None of these: it was just a turntable table. The Mana Acoustics Reference Sound Table to be precise.
I call it “just a turntable table” because that’s all it is: literally it is no more than a table upon which to place a turntable (or any other piece of equipment). However, the overall improvement it wrought within my system was so dramatic that such a mundane description does it a disservice.
Let me start by attempting to quantify the improvements of which I speak. When I added the Lingo power supply to my Linn LP12 turntable I was pleasantly startled by the way the system’s performance took a leap forward. Any improvement to the turntable is going to have a big effect on the rest of the system: that much makes perfect sense. The Lingo costs around £500 and I think it’s not ridiculously over-priced for the performance boost it gives. The gains to be had by placing the turntable on the Mana Reference are of the same order. It costs £275.
This year has been good for my system, and the improvements I have made to it have reinforced my belief in the system hierarchy principle. What a pity that they all came in the wrong order! “Some find it late”, indeed! First came the NAC52 preamp, which showed more of what my source components were doing, for better or worse. On balance, the record playing side of the system improved beyond measure when the NAC52 was introduced: but I became acutely aware that the Linn was in sore need of some radical attention; more than just a re-set, something fundamental. The performance ceiling of the preamp was a little too high for the LP12′s comfort, leaving its weaknesses too exposed.
Along came the Lingo power supply to address this problem. You can read about this item in detail in this month’s “Test Match”. With that fitted the system was sounding better than ever. I could honestly find little to fault about the way it was performing. God was in his heaven and Steward was feeling smug and confident.
Then along came John Watson, who pointed out that from the prior knowledge he had gained installing his table in many other systems he reckoned I wasn’t getting full value for money from my hi-fi. I was affronted and demanded proof or satisfaction. After thirty minutes spent spiking and levelling his table I put away my duelling pistols. The system was going down lower than before, going higher than before, giving out more information, and doing this with a marked increase in control and ease.
By this point the cynical reader will be saying to himself that he has heard all this before. He will be asking if it is truly possible that any hi-fi system, that was any good in the first instance, can undergo such radical and dramatic improvements. The answer is yes, of course it can. This is not another manifestation of the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome. It is a reflection of the fact that even the finest stand miles away from the sound of real musicians playing real instruments.
I’ve been in studios where I’ve been able to wander from the control room into the area where the performers were playing: that’s an enlightening and salutary experience. Even when one is as close to the performance as being in the control room listening to original multi-tracks, taking those few steps into the room with the musicians playing hammers home the difference between reality and what comes off the tape.
If there’s room for improvement in the recording and monitoring chain that close to the original event, imagine how far we’ve got to go with domestic equipment. As one wag scrawled on a poster which proclaimed that a certain Japanese manufacturer’s hi-fi took the listener `one step closer to reality’: “What difference does one step make when you’re a million miles away in the first place?”. Cruel but true.
A philosopher once said that even the longest journey starts with a single step. Hi-fi enthusiasts embark on one hell of a journey when they decide to take the hobby seriously. What the Mana table shows is that what one might dismiss as being too small a step to concern oneself with – after all, it is only a table – shouldn’t be disregarded out of hand. Myself and other experienced, sceptical, professional listeners to whom I’ve introduced this device are still trying to figure out why it makes such a large improvement to a system. We still listen to it then look at each other in total disbelief and begin talking in tired exclamations of amazement and bewilderment.
There have been many products which have attracted such a buzz, and have been described in hyperbolic prose. But believe me, the Mana Reference Sound Table deserves each and every superlative that’s been heaped upon it.
