A $100 wonder

[emaidel]

My previous thread on the "Achromat" turntable mat got little attention, and now that I've spent many hours listening both with, and without it, the good news I want to report is too important to post under that thread, and possibly not to be seen by many who'll benefit from what I have to say. I know, this sounds awfully exaggerated, but believe me, it's not. The Achromat turntable mat really and truly works, and works quite well too.

Most audiophiles are tinkerers, or "tweakers," and I must confess to that behavior. I guess then that I must be becoming a "true" audiophile: first I purchased an $80 digital coax cable from Monster Cable and wrote extensively about how much better it made my CD's sound, using it to connect my DAC to my CD player, and how much better it sounded than the far more expensive D-60 "Illuminati" cable it replaced. Next, I went all but nuts over the enormous improvement the Dual CS-5000 I "won" on ebay made over all the previous turntables I'd ever owned, and became a convert to the belief of many audiophiles that belt-drive is the superior drive system (despite several furiously angry howls of protest from one member). And now, here I am waximg poetic about a turntable mat. Whatever has become of me?

In the past, I never gave much credence to many of the claims of audiophiles. I didn't believe the drive system of a turntable made any difference, and, since I'd been so satisfied with the performance of the many direct drive turntables I'd owned, I just thought the claims that a well-designed belt-drive turntable somehow sounding better were pure nonsense. The CS-5000 changed that, and did so by leaps and bounds. If it sounds as good as it does, I can only wonder how much better an upscale Rega or Musical Fidelity table would sound over it. Right now, price prevents me from finding out the answer to that.

$80 for a cable that makes a huge difference? Nonsense, no? NO! The Monster Cable Z-200D digital coax cable made an enormous difference in the sound of my CD player, and for a lot less money than I had spent on other cables in the past.

And now, I actually went out and spent $80 for nothing more than a turntable mat? (Actually, it was a "customer return" at The Needle Doctor - its normal price is $100.) You can spend an awful lot more than either $80 or $100 and get a lot less of a sonic improvement.

The difference is all over the place: more clarity, depth, delineation of instruments, front/back placement, bass impact, dynamic range, and still more. If I were to put the differences all into just one word, that word would be, "alive." Records played on the Achromat just sound more alive than before, and after listening to dozens of records, first without, and then with the Achromat, I have to state that each and every record, whether classical, folk or rock exhibited a noticeable degree of improvement.

The "ultimate" test came when I asked my wife to sit down and listen. Most of the time, she thinks I'm nuts when I ask her to listen to "A," and then to "B" and tell me whether or not she hears a difference. She noticed an immediate difference, and asked me just what it was that the mat was doing that provided such a noticeable improvement in sound. At that point, I was stumped. The supplied literature didn't help much here, either.

According to the one-page piece of literature that comes with the Achromat, it's made of something "with the same characteristics of the record," and not MDF, which I initially suspected. The following statement, while it attempts to explain why the mat works, sounds more to me like advertising nonsense: "Achromat's construcion of long microscopic tunnels means the energy dissipates as molecular heat, never returning." Really? I'll leave the veracity of that statement up to each individual reader.

In the meantime, if you've got a really good system (and I do mean really good), and would like to do something to improve its performance without busting your bank account, the $100 Achromat is a winner!

[O'Shag]

Nice review emaidel. I think I'll have to check this one out...