Now that the inventors of the CD freely admit that it was never intended to be a true High Fidelity medium, and as, so far, the higher resolution digital formats (SACD and DVD-A) are withering on the vine of consumer indifference, the analogue LP remains our best medium for depicting the sonic and aesthetic reality of a music event. Though supposedly obsolete for a generation now, the analogue LP continues to thrive and flourish, its playback quality continually refined and improved by the unbroken development in turntables, tonearms and phono stages. Though extracting 100% of the information contained in those undulating LP groove walls (I liken it to picking a dust mote out of the eye of a flea with a 20-mile long pole during a hurricane) seems perhaps unattainable, the increased sonic and musical rewards resulting from this continued evolution still inspires companies to strive to attain that elusive ultimate Ideal. Particularly noteworthy are the new companies that have emerged during this millennium, companies who chose to pursue that tantalizing Ideal of perfect LP playback not from any vested interest, but because of the LP’s inherent musical potential.

The UK’s GSP (Graham Slee Projects) Audio is one such firm, emerging seemingly from out of nowhere during the last few years to set new standards in phono stage playback. Refreshingly, the company prices its products within a range that the average music lover can afford. I’m deeply sympathetic to this philosophy, having found that most ardent Music Heads are rarely endowed with the kind of income that the decadent segment of the High End panders to.

Graham Slee is a dedicated advocate of wide frequency bandwidth design, a fundamental audio design concept that CD, with its Orwellian NewThink propaganda attempted to ignore, much to the format’s sonic and musical detriment. Wide frequency bandwidth design isn’t exactly new – the legendary Stewart Hegeman, the design philosophy’s prime US guru, was achieving it with tube designs in the early 1960’s. Nor is it recondite or occult: even introductory electronics texts cover the concept. Its purpose is not to inordinately excite dogs, bats, or other species blessed with ultra-sonic hearing, but to guarantee that we music-loving humans will hear all the frequencies and overtones of music without corruption. Over-simplified, the concept could be summed up as: if you want to reproduce frequency X correctly, design the circuit to handle at least 10X.

I’ve reviewed Graham Slee’s Elevator EXP moving-coil and the ERA V Gold moving magnet/high output moving-coil phono preamplifiers for The Stereo Times (http://www.stereotimes.com/acc103105.shtml) and found them exemplary performers and worthy additions to my reference group of phono preamplifiers. The new Reflex, the result of 2 years’ development, builds on the fundamental architecture of the ERA V Gold. It uses the same PSU-1 outboard power supply and only the glowing red light and the name “Reflex” on the active box indicate the outward difference. It’s what’s inside that box, and what happens to the music coming out of it that led Slee to make the Reflex a separate model, rather than simply a “Platinum” version of the ERA V Gold.

I was aware of the Reflex’s existence and had put it on my “Must Hear” list of future review items. The future became the now when I learned, during my review of The Cartridge Man MusicMaker Classic phono cartridge, that Leonard Gregory had used the new Reflex as one of his reference phono stages in the development of his latest masterpiece. Being just sentient enough to recognize Synchronicity when it is intimated, I quickly obtained a review sample of the Reflex.

Listening to the Musicmaker Classic through the Reflex revealed an additional layer of naturalness, true-to-life timbral detail, and true-to-the-music rhythm, timing, and expressive nuance that some other excellent phono stages in my reviewing stable could not fully resolve. The Classic/Reflex combination’s ability to reveal the acoustic ambience of the recording venue on Classical recordings was truly exceptional: orchestral instruments rose and fell within that ambience, just as they do live. The recording venue assumed a tangible physical presence that made the musical illusion all that more intact. No Crying Clown/Black Velvet painting here. Since one of the phono stages I had used in reviewing the MusicMaker Classic was the Graham Slee ERA V Gold, I was surprised at how much better the new Reflex was in revealing the outer reaches of the Classic’s considerable potential. When I learned that the Reflex costs just $1260, compared to the $925 price of the ERA V Gold, I was flummoxed. Certainly, the subjective weighing of the Reflex’s gains over the already excellent ERA V Gold made the price differential seem inconsequential. Were Graham Slee infected with the Pander to the Plutocrat mindset of The High End, he could have easily slapped the Reflex into a 50-lb. box and charged $5000 for it. But that’s not what his company, or the man, is about. Bravo!

Compared to the ERA V Gold, the Reflex revealed a richer and more true-to-life recreation of timbre and tonal color. Contribute this to more accurate replication of instrumental harmonic signatures. The ERA’s superb ability to trace the transient envelope of each sonic event was even better with the Reflex. The silence between sonic events and musical notes was even more clear, high frequency reproduction of percussion transients being completely without smear or blurring, their rhythmic timing even better organized. But perhaps the most noticeable and valued gain of the Reflex over its less expensive brother was its increased exuberance and expansion of emotional expressiveness. The Reflex sounds more refined, subtly detailed, and delicate, and at the same time, more rugged and robust. With a few combinations of table/cartridge/speaker, the ERA can sound a little reticent and almost too-tightly controlled in the bass, as if it were compensating for the thick and lead-footed bass portrayal of high-mass, suspension-less turntables. And with wildly emotional musical expression, it can seem very slightly reserved. Though careful system matching will eliminate the appearance of this phenomenon, it remains a possibility. The Reflex revealed no such limits: it handled any music with an expressive brio, grace, and nuance that made listening to all types of music a direct aesthetic experience. Used with The MusicMaker Classic, the Reflex is simply spell-binding, capable of producing that deep aesthetic trance that carries one away with the music.

The Reflex’s abilities were not solely limited to the Classic phono cartridge, however, as a batch of other phono cartridges auditioned on four different turntables revealed. I feel more and more sad that Shure has discontinued its superb V15 V xMR phono cartridge (due to loss of a subcontractor to roll its thin-walled beryllium cantilever.) The Shure is/was a truly great phono cartridge, offering a standard of neutrality, detail, musical drive, rhythm, and expressiveness that is unassailable. Its $400 retail price meant that even budget-constrained music lovers could afford a truly neutral and uncompromised phono cartridge. The Shure’s performance with the Reflex was simply superb, the cartridge’s ultimate potential fully realized. It was the same with other highly musical and affordable phono cartridges – from the stupidly cheap ($180) high-output moving coil Denon DL160 to the last of Joe Grado’s Signature masterpieces – the TLZ-V. The Cartridge Man MusicMaker III ($1000) was also a strikingly excellent match.

The Reflex is designed for high-output moving-coil and standard moving-magnet output levels. Use with low-output moving-coil designs will require the Elevator EXP, which offers load-impedance choice as well as the additional active gain necessary to drive the Reflex. The Reflex’s moving-coil performance, both with and without the Elevator, was simply revelatory. Although the moving-coil cartridge has been considered by many as the only high performance path to take, there have been legitimate reasons for dissent: all too often moving coil cartridges (or, to be more precise, at least one wing of this design school) fail to match the better MM’s and MI’s in integrating sonics into a harmonious and organic whole. Some MC’s can leave the high frequency response out on a limb, with a rising output, occasional shrillness, and an overall cold, clinical, and sterile aspect. To be sure, this aspect was not always purely the MC’s cartridge’s inherent fault; tonearm limitations and the phono preamp also contributed to the net result. Take an MC’s rising output and its high frequency vinyl/stylus resonance; add this high frequency garbage to a tonearm’s own high frequency resonances and the signal arriving at the phono section all too often overloaded it, creating that silvery brightness that many still associate as the signature moving coil sound. The Reflex’s extended bandwidth and its freedom from overload brushed off these problems as if they were inconsequential flies, revealing treble performance that is transparent, clear, free from smearing and ringing, highly resolved, and seemingly extending into the Aether. You can credit the Reflex’s extended bandwidth design for this. It doesn’t roll-off the high frequencies in order to render them palatable; it resolves the delicate detail without adding to the potential problems.

Mounted on Origin Live’s superb new $935 Silver MKII tonearm, formerly problematic cartridges like the older Blue Point Special, Goldring Eroica LX, the discontinued Talisman Boron and Audio Technica AT OC9ML, and the current Dynavector Karat were simply transformed, sounding the best (and most natural) they ever have. While contemporary moving-coil designs are moving towards a richer, more natural sonic balance, non-moving coil designs have been extending their already organic sonics to higher levels of transparency and detail. The Reflex does complete justice to both, allowing one to choose a cartridge based on its merits rather than on one’s phono section’s ability to handle it. The high-output moving-coil, in particular, positively blooms, emerging from its near-Limbo compromised status of being neither one nor the other under the old classifications, and becomes a completely valid and uncompromised choice.

Improving a component’s sonic resolution doesn’t automatically improve its musical performance. Happily, the Reflex’s increased accuracy in tracking the transient of each note and the spaces between notes leads directly to more accurate portrayal of rhythm, timing, phrasing, and punctuation, along with increased perception of the means and the expressiveness of the playing. Everything that the ERA V Gold does so well musically, the Reflex does that much better. There’s more grace and more fire.

Perhaps because I had been through the learning curve already with the ERA V Gold, and because the density of reviewing chores prevented the “watched pot never boils” syndrome, it was easier to get the Reflex to sing. Burn-in time seemed far shorter than the ERA, and the Reflex proved less high-strung in system matching. Isolating the PSU-1 power supply proved more important that isolating the Reflex’s active box, as with the ERA. An unusually cost-effective method of optimizing the Reflex was to place each unit on a small individual slab of maple and then isolating each slab with Vibrapods’ Vibracones. Interconnect matching proved easy too: the $160 Rega Couple and the $250 Origin Live Reference both proved able and willing dance partners, the Couple sounding wonderfully natural and integrated, the Origin Live interconnect pushing up the Couple’s resolution to a higher plateau. While the Reflex does not possess the traditional tube sonic signature, it merged chameleon-like with tube electronics, its presence inaudible.

As impressed as I was with the ERA V Gold, I was wowed by the Reflex: listening to it partnered with the MusicMaker Classic cartridge was one of those “Aha!” moments when everything fused into a complementary and harmonious musical whole. The Reflex offers exceptionally low noise, exceptionally transparent and neutral depiction of the entire musical bandwidth, and equally exceptional music-making capabilities. To achieve its level of performance at its $1260 price goes beyond exceptional to unique. Used in a system of equally high musical and sonic resolution, the Reflex becomes one of those “Final Destination” products. Highly recommended!

Footnote: Users in the EU should note that the Reflex fully complies with the European Parliament RoHS directive without sonic compromise. So add environmentally friendly design to the Reflex’s musical and sonic virtues.

Paul Szabady

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Specifications
Solid-State high-output moving coil and moving magnet phono preamplifier w/ outboard PSU-1 power supply.
Price: $1260.


Address:
Manufacturer: Graham Slee Projects
1 Monks Way, Monk Bretton,
South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
S71 2JD.
Telephone: 0(044)1226 244908
Email: info@gspaudio.co.uk
Website: http://www.gspaudio.co.uk/index.htm

US Distributor
Starbrandz Networks
2227 Double Tree Ave.
Henderson, NV 89052
702.631.7558 Tel
702.974.0220 Fax

Website: www.starbrandz.com
Email: info@starbrandz.com