Oz Hi-fi Comes Of Age
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday April 24, 1988
WENT to a hi-fi show the other night. Just a little hi-fi show, out in the Sydney suburbs - but brother, was it star-studded!
Among the interesting people I spoke to were:
* The world's leading experts on diamond styli - the tiny tips that ride the grooves on an LP record and do the real work of extracting the musical details.
* One of the world's leading innovators in the design of electrostatic loudspeakers - high-tech devices that reproduce music in gorgeous detail, without using speaker cones.
* The designer and manufacturer of some of the world's best and most powerful hi-fi amplifiers.
And (here's the really interesting part) all of them were Australian!
Although there's always been an Australian hi-fi industry of sorts, in the past it's languished - partly because it was fragmented, and partly because its products were perceived as inferior to imported gear.
Last week's Oz-Fi Show, organised by Burwood hi-fi specialist store Pirimai, was the first time the industry has been on show collectively. And no-one could have been left in any doubt that the products on display were first-class and ready to take on the world. Indeed, some are already earning big export bickies. Let me mention just a few.
The world's leading experts on diamond stylii are the Garrott Brothers -more famed overseas than they are in Australia. Audiophiles around the world send their phono cartridges to the Garrott headquarters in the Blue Mountains for retipping with one of their brilliantly-cut and polished diamonds, able to extract the very last nuance of sound from the groove.
The Garrotts make cartridges as well as fit diamonds, and they're by no means solely for well-heeled audio-nuts. Their new K-series, on display at the show, is designed to dramatically improve the sound of quite basic record players.
I recently tried a K-1 in a distinctly basic Yamaha turntable, replacing a respectable Ortofon cartridge. The benefits were immediately obvious: crisper detail, fine separation of instruments, and a lovely, natural sound -well-worth the $99 asking price.
The innovator in electrostatic speakers is Vasey Stocks, from Melbourne-based Precision Fidelity. He was showing his exciting new Stag ELS 1000 electrostatics - enormous curved panels of perforated metal, framed in hand-rubbed jarrah timber.
Electrostatics don't have normal speaker cones. They produce sound from a membrane vibrating in a charged electrical field. They produce music that's light, airy and very finely detailed - ideal for classical music listening. But they can be hard to drive correctly, frequently lack a really rich, deep bass, and can be hideously expensive.
The Stags have overcome at least two of these problems: Vasey Stocks has used computer-aided design to extract good bass, down to 40 Herz, and the price of $4,000 is much cheaper than electrostatics from overseas. But they do need good, powerful amplifiers: at least 100 watts a channel.
Good, powerful amplification is just what Peter Stein of ME Sound provides. His growing range of ME amps, designed and hand-built at Dyers Crossing, near Taree, are becoming hi-fi legends.
The range runs from the 80-watt ME 550, selling for around $1,000, up to the mighty ME 1500, rated at 220 rms into 8 ohms - but capable under certain conditions of up to 1500 watts. An ME 1500 will set you back around $8,000 -and at least one was sold at the Pirimai show.
For people who don't have much space, but want top-quality sound, Australian market leader Richter Acoustics has two super-compact models: Fairytales ($695) and Dreamtimes ($895), both delivering wondrous amounts of clean, airy music from tiny boxes.
But Richter's show-stoppers were their radical new Secret Weapons -floor-standing systems designed for high-volume, realistic reproduction of the full ambience of a live performance.
Among the novel touches are a "chimney-port" which fires bass notes vertically, rather than forward or backward; a piezo-electric super-tweeter for the ultra-high frequencies; and time-delay devices to recreate concert-hall ambience. Bass reproduction - taut, fast and crackling with energy - is electrifying.
The Secret Weapons will sell for $1,995, while an advanced version with a bigger Australian-made woofer, the V250, will go for $2,495.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald
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