Kuzma Stabi XL Turntable/ Air Line Arm, Walker Proscenium Black Diamond Record Player

Kuzma vs. Walker: The Title Bout in Analog Playback

There is one other difference between the Kuzma and the Walker that I might as well point out right now: The Kuzma Stabi XL turntable and Air Line tonearm comprise the most beautifully machined, professionally finished, and intelligently ergonomic straightline- tracking record player I’ve seen or played with. While the Walker is also beautiful and beautifully made, if high-tech sexiness and ease of adjustment are your first priorities, then this contest is over before it starts. The Kuzma wins.

Before I turn to the sound, let me tell you how I tested the ’tables. First, using the same discs, I compared the Kuzma and Walker to each other and to the sound of the real thing in a real space (as I hear it). I made no attempt to determine which ’table was more “faithful” to what was on the mastertapes. I’m not equipped to do that; plus, tapes sound different than vinyl. Second, I used identical cartridges (the Air Tight PC-1) in both arms, set at the same tracking force and as near as I could come to the same VTA. All other equipment—from phonostage to preamp to power amp to loudspeakers—remained the same for both ’tables, as did the loading of the cartridges. Third, both ’tables were seated on top of the same massive platform— Lloyd Walker’s 450- pound, rock-maple, shot-loaded, Valid- Point-tipped Prologue Reference equipment stand—which was carefully leveled, fore and aft. The only variable in setup—and it was unavoidable—were the tonearm interconnects. The Kuzma comes with singleended Cardas interconnects hard-wired to the tonearms leads; the Walker has RCA outputs at the back of its plinth, to which you attach interconnects of your choice (in this case, Tara Labs “Zeros”).

Since both record players showed the same sets of virtues on every record I played—no matter what kind of music or how large the ensemble—I am going to try something a bit different in this review. I am going to talk, primarily, about how well each turntable let me hear one representative piece of music, Alfred Schnittke’s Quasi una sonata [EMI]—a brilliant post-Modernist caprice for violin and piano that is extraordinarily dynamic, extraordinarily rich and nuanced in tone color, and extraordinarily well-recorded.

First a bit about the piece itself. In Schnittke’s words, Quasi una sonata “is a report on the impossibility of the sonata in the form of a sonata.” It begins with a tremendous crashing G minor chord played sforzando (suddenly, with great force) on the piano, followed after a long moment of silence by a rippingly dissonant chord played sforzando on the violin—tonality and atonality (the twin poles of twentiethcentury music) deliberately pitted against each other at the top of each instrument’s voice, like a shouting match between, say, Samuel Barber and Arnold Schoenberg.

As the piece goes on, these two kinds of music are stated and restated at different dynamic levels and with different articulations, like the “themes” and tonal centers of a traditional sonata. Yet despite constant attempts to set them in joint musical motion—including an adagio ironically based on the classic B-A-C-H motive and a fugue also ironically based on the classic BA- C-H motive—the two musics refuse to be reconciled. No matter how loudly or softly the instruments play or what manner they play in—and they are played in every form of staccato and legato known to man, making for a stunningly virtuosic sonic exercise—musical momentum keeps breaking down.

To make musical sense of Quasi una sonata, a record player has, first and foremost, to capture realistically the unusual timbres that are at the heart of this argument between the tonal and the atonal; while doing this, it also has to capture the bravura way the piece is played—for the extreme means it takes to produce these timbres is the other great point and pleasure of Schnittke’s composition.

If leading-edge dynamics were the whole of these tasks, the Kuzma Stabi XL/Air Line would win by a nose. It is phenomenally quick and clear and clean. Though it gets a leg up in these regards from being paired with the Air Tight PC-1, which is the “fastest” cartridge I’ve auditioned (marginally faster, even, than the super-speedy London Reference), even when paired with lesser cartridges the Kuzma reproduces violinist Gidon Kremer’s pizzicatos, collés (where the bow is thrown forcefully against the strings, making a hard, explosive “T”- like sound), and ricochéts (where the bow is bounced off the strings, making a kind of rat-a-tat-tat noise, like “ta-ta-ta-ta-tah”), with unprecedented realism. Indeed, anything transientrelated— such as the little ripping noises that the hairs of a violin bow makes just as they bite into a string, or the slight, soft shifting of a piano’s action when a key is jabbed or of a foot-pedal when it is depressed or released—is more clearly reproduced by the Kuzma than by anything else I’ve heard, digital or analog, including the Walker.