One of the great things about the hifi industry is its global variation in style and concepts. What I mean is British hifi is different to European hifi, American hifi has its own thing going on and Japanese hifi is different again. And Phasemation is one of those Japanese brands that is as mysterious as those makers of beautiful samurai swords you sometimes see on antiques shows. Take a look at their website here and you’ll see what I mean.
The Phasemation physical designs remind me of those early Sony Walkman tape players - the pro ones that were built like a Nikon camera. But the two main features that really characterise the brand are its vinyl focus and the goal of minimising phase errors in all of its products. So cartridges are on the product list, and so too are a strong range of phono stages, and valve amplifiers.
The phase error philosophy is the real interesting thing here, and the use of no feedback circuit designs to achieve it. When I think back to my electronics training, I remember the lessons on feedback, with the calculations of feedback amounts, gain and so on, and how lots of feedback would improve linearity. And when the transistor age dawned, everyone could really pile on the feedback to improve their published specs for noise, frequency response and bandwidth. Plus of course, the ability to maintain those good specs with cheaper, lower tolerance parts.
But there is a school of thought that feedback robs a sense of life out of the sound and damages a lot of the three-dimensionality aspects of two channel reproduction (that relies in no small part on the varying phase information in the recording's left and right channels). My own long-term listening experience with going from 'high' to 'moderately low' levels of feedback, by moving from solid state to valve amplification, certainly seems to have supported the theory. The simple valve amp seemed to have a speed of responsiveness and tonal freshness that was always better than similarly priced solid state alternatives, despite it's poorer measurements. And it imaged very well too.
But coming back to Phasemation, the other fascinating element is their cartridges. With a broad price range, there's a lot to tempt those with fairly deep (or very deep) pockets. And they're ruffling feathers around the industry with their stellar performance. Alan Sircom of Hi>Fi+ said this about the brand, "Phasemation has been hi-fi+’s most recent analogue find." He recently reviewed the PP-2000 cartridge and was extremely impressed by it. You can see his review here.
So Phasemation is now available at Winters Audio. You can read all the details here. And if you're interested in finding out more, please don't hesitate to give us a call.
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