Not an advert for the healing powers of magnetic bracelets. Rather, a testimonial on the restorative benefits of magnetic volume controls. The priciest component I ever reviewed was such a one: $60'500 worth no less. Today shaves off 90% to revisit Hattor Audio's Autoformer Reference Preamp executed with a quad of silver autoformers. I just put its own review to bed a day ago. Now the machine itself has permanently embedded in this system. It's feeding both speaker and headphone systems with the same remote-controlled precision volume. But if that's all it did, H'nG it woulda been: hi and good-bye. My Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe has its own ladder-on-a-chip Muses analog volume control. So does the Lifesaver Audio Gradient Box II active analog crossover. Both come with IR remote. To earn its keep, the ARP-S certainly had to do more than just cut signal voltage. And more it does indeed. If it's a lazy day or late at night with you unable to fall asleep, follow the two review links and (re?)familiarize yourself with the topic. They're variations on the same theme so amount to exactly the same audible action. Not having had them at the same time, I just couldn't tell you about equality of magnitude of said action. With the ARP-S review even shared with regular Warsaw contributor Dawid Grzyb for a 2nd opinion, the perfect observational overlay between us two different listeners with different rooms, hardware and taste suggests that what we heard is precisely what such devices are all about when executed properly. Which is? Well, um – magick.
Of course like that other weasel word musicality, that just won't stand; not in these pages. The young Turks on the YouTube review channels love the term 'technical'. When a component aces all basic specs of low distortion, low noise, high linearity and drive, they call it technical. The ASR site simply measures components to focus exclusively on this technical side without any listening. By that metric, perfect measurements equal perfect sound. And that's available for a few hundred bucks from the likes of Topping and smsl. On the opposite end of that dogma flourishes an underground of direct-heated triodes and horns or widebanders plus single-ended static-induction transistors. Their admirers revel in the condemnation technical measurements might assign to their choices. What I hear proper magnetic volume controls executed with multi-tapped step-down transformers or autoformers do is both technically sound—zero noise, no amplitude deviation or harmonic distortion—and elusive. That's because what they do past the technical stuff goes beyond what we know how to measure or account for in current hifi lingo.
The best I've come up with on the lingo score is intentionality, energy transmission and suchness. All of these qualities intensify. That's borne out by repeat observation. It just doesn't explain how this intensification comes about. That's the magickal part. Now magick simply means that which we can observe but not explain. The observation itself is accompanied by greater persuasiveness and gratification. And just perhaps, an example from my kitchen is relevant in this regard. In the morning I love to mix fresh grapefruit and lemon juice with hot water and a spoonful of honey. So I used to do the obvious: squeeze the citrus, discard rind and pulp. After having recently sharpened my chef's knife to a wicked edge, I decided to leave the fruit whole, just trim off the outer rind above the white pith then put the denuded fruits into a blender with the same hot water and honey as always. Game changer. It turned a drink into a food. My body reacts as though it had eaten something. It's not hungry for hours whereas before it was just a vitamin C-rich liquid to counter dehydration. Liquefying the whole fruit rather than discarding its membranes, pulp and seeds triggers a very different bodily response. More wholosity as Harvey Rosenberg may have said? Back to magnetic magick, something similar applies. The listening experience gets more nutritious, (ful)filling and satisfying. I just don't understand the mechanism at play.
No matter.
I'll continue to liquefy whole citrus and enjoy my upstairs system with the new passive-magnetic volume controller.
No understanding required. The experience validates itself…
Postscript: A day after publishing this article, Jonathan Gorse's SoundStage Ultra review of the Townshend Audio Allegri Reference Preamplifier dropped. This AVC has a £13'876 retail. Here are some excerpts from the review: "…probably the most three-dimensional preamplifier I have ever heard… impressively dynamic… excellent power and drive… has strengths which are rare outside an extremely elite group of valve amplifiers of impeccable quality… stunning transparency… incredibly quiet… vanishingly low noise floor… improved the perceived dynamics by delivering inky-black backgrounds… startling clarity… absence of grain… bass was fulsome and surprisingly taut…". If my own descriptions used lingo which didn't communicate expected audio qualities, these excerpts nicely fill those gaps.
