Pass Labs' XP-30 triple-decker preamp

COST-NO-OBJECT POWER AMPLIFIERS from Ypsilon & Lamm

NEW CONTENDER FOR THE LP PLAYER HEAVYWEIGHT CROWN TechDAS' powerhouse Air Force One

TUBESOUNDATITSVERYBEST Nagra's Jazz preamplifier

THE ENTRY LEVEL: SETTING UP A SUBWOOFER

INTERVIEW: YVES BEAUVAIS AND THE ROLE OF A RECORD PRODUCER

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FEATURES 52 Recommended Components Stereophile's writers and editors rate the best-sounding audio

components that have been reviewed in the magazine.

117 Book Review: A Pair of Wharfedales John Marks reviews a new book on legendary loudspeaker engi­neer, Gilbert Briggs.

119 One Man's Journey from Major Labels to Mcintosh

If Yves Beauvais thought working as an A&R executive was

tough, wait until he sees his name viciously sullied in audio-

149 Lamm ML2.2 monoblock power amplifier by Art Dudley

p.149

161 Nagra Jazz line preamplifier by Robert J. Reina

phile chat rooms! Now restoring vintage tube amps for a living,

Beauvais has an unusual perspective on sound, music, and which

artists to record, says Robert Baird. 171 Autonomic Controls Mirage MMS-SA

media server

EQUIPMENT REPORTS 124 Pass Labs XP-30 line preamplifier

by John Atkinson

135 Ypsilon Aelius monoblock power amplifier by Michael Fremer

by John Atkinson

FOLLOW-UPS 180 Arcam FMJ 033 D/A processor

by John Atkinson

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Stereophile (USPS #734-970 ISSN: 0585-2544) Vol.36 No.4, April 2013, Issue Number 399. Copyright© 2013 by Source Interlink Magazines, LLC. All rights reserved. Published monthly by Source Interlink Media, LLC., 261 Madison Ave., 51ti Floor, New York, NY 10016-2303. Periodicals Postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. Subscription rates for one year (12 issues) U.S., APO, FPO, and U.S. Possessions $19.94, Canada $31.94, Foreign orders add $24 (including surface mail postage). Payment in advance, U.S. funds only. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to Stereophile, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Mailing lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would be of interest to our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings, please send your current mailing label, or an exact copy, to: Stereophile, Mail Preference Service, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235. Subscription Service: Should you wish to change your address, or order new subscriptions, you can do so by writing to the same address. Printed in the USA.

stereophile.com • April 2013 5

\\ hile the selection and fine tuning of exhilarating-sounding vintage audio equipment is an exciting, often life-long search, let's not forget it's ultimately the music that matters-mankind's mysterious mastery of making air move in esthetically & emotionally thrilling ways. Most importantly, remember to ask yourself the age-old question: Can I dance to it?"

This has always been the conundrum of being an audiophile: Are you in it for the gear or for the music? And while it's perfectly acceptable, even preferable, to choose both, for many the choice is stark.

For Yves Beauvais, who has now moved between the worlds of music and high-end audio, and whose website for his vintage-gear business, Vmtage Vacuum Audio (www.vintagevacuumaudio.com), bears the above statement, the answer is simple.

"Most of the people I sell gear to, we never talk about music," Beauvais says &om his home in Memphis, Tennessee. ''You go to audiophile newsgroups, Audiokarma.com, and no one ever speaks about music. Audiophiles-I hate that term, by the way; I am not an audiophile, I am a music lover-audiophiles don't like music. They like audio." .

Beauvais is one of a very small flock of rare birds who have worked at the highest levels of the major-label record business­in his case, Atlantic Records-and who now live and work in tl1e rarefied world of high-end audio. As anyone knows who's ever bought an LP pressed by a major label in the 1970s, high-end audio and the majors are often mun1ally exclusive-yet for

stereophile.com • April 2013 119

Beauvais with Ahrnet Ertegun (top; photo courtesy NARAS), and with Ornette Coleman (photo courtesy David Gahr).

Beauvais, a fan of the States who settled here permanently in the 1980s, interest in gear and music began ahnost simultaneously.

Now 53, Beauvais was born and raised in Paris. His father, a rare-book dealer, encouraged his son's love of music by allowing him to hang a poster of Beethoven in his pre­teen bedroom. "I had no interest in pop music until I heard Leonard Cohen on the radio, who led me to Bob Dylan. My interest in American music came fiom lyrics more than music.

"In my childhood, my first record player, my first tape recorder, any piece of gear I had, the minute I brought it home fiom the store, I would have to open it up to see what was inside. I was always a tinkerer. And I was always interested to look at circuitry."

After participating in a student-exchange program that gave him his first taste of America with a summer spent in Boston in 1975, Beauvais returned tlle following year and visited his sister, who was working as an au pair in New York City. ''Within minutes, I knew I would live there. A week after I finished college [in France], I had a one-way ticket to the US, with the intention to work in the record business."

It took Beauvais a couple years of scuftling to find a gig at one of his favorite sources of American music, Atlantic Records.

After holding a series of lesser jobs-including staff writer, producing artist bios and press releases at Atlantic's headquarters at 75 Rockefeller Plaza-Beauvais made his move.

"I realized that when the CD format was introduced, Atlantic had no reissue, no catalog department-there was no one in charge of curating their catalog on CD, or even before, on vinyl. It was very strange. So I wrote a proposal to Doug Morris, who was president at the time-Ahmet [Ertegun] was chairman-a one-page memo. So he calls me down to his office and says, 'I looked at your sheet of paper, and you're a young guy. Why would you want to bother with that old shit?"'

Given the green light by Morris, Beauvais launched a reissue ~rograrn that began with the first Led Zeppelin boxed set (what he now calls "the big orange thing"). Single-disc reissues of nearly the entire Otis Redding catalog, and multi-disc sets of Yes, Ray Charles, and more Zep, followed.

"I spent five years doing that. It was the greatest job I ever had .. . learning remastering with Otis Redding or Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin. And speaking to Ahmet Ertegun every day. And Jerry Wexler on the telephone. And having conversations with Ray Charles. And Led Zeppelin, the tlrree of them in a room. I was still a kid. I still think of myself as a kid, but back them I was 28, 29 years old. It was very cool. A wonderful education. And complete creative fieedom, because with reissues you can't lose money. Even if you sell 5000 copies, you still make the company 20 grand. I'll never be as happy as I was

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC

during those years." All things, however, must end In 1992, Rhino

became Tune Warner's official reissue arm, leaving Beauvais more or less out of a job. Ahmet Ertegun, whom Beauvais considers his mentor, provided his young prorege with an out

"He called me into his office and said, 'I want to start a jazz label again and I want you to run it.' I told him, 'No, I'm not interested.' The third time he called-and you can't say no to Ahmet tlrree times, he's very char.111ing, very convincing-he said, 'You don't have to sign just jazz; you can sign other stuff, as long as we have a jazz presence."'

Beauvais vividly remembers Ahmet Ertegun's theory of artists and repertoire (A&R). "Alunet was dead set against following your heart. There are really two

schools of A&R-ing. The first is, you sign what you love, you sign what you know is great, because it turns you on when you listen to it. You have what Lester Bangs called 'a hard-on of the heart' when you listen to it. And that was Jerry Wexler's approach. Ahmet's was sign what you know is going to sell. With the m oney you make fiom the records you sell, you go to the record store and buy the records you love.

''After a year of me doing A&R, [Ahmet] called me in and said, 'I know you have very good taste, but I have this sense that so far you are only signing artists that you like or that you love. That's not your job. Your job is to sign artists that the American public wants to buy. Who cares if you love them or not? My favorite singer of all time is Fred Astaire, but I don't make Fred Astaire records at Atlantic. I make AC/DC records, and with AC/DC money I buy Fred Astaire records.'

"I completely fieaked out upon hearing this. I cannot cynically guess . .. I do not have that sense, and I'm not really tliat interested in developing it, either. It was somewhat humiliating. So when I came back from Ahmet's office, I called Jerry W exler and told him, 'I just had a conversation with Ahmet and he says I shouldn't sign what I love, I should sign what sells.' And he said, 'That's the second-taste story, right? I've been having this fight with him for 50 years. Don't listen to him, he's totally wrong. Only sign what you love. Only sign what you believe in, deeply, deeply, deeply. Because if what you sign cynically doesn't work-it's a stiff-then you go down as the guy with bad taste. If the shit that you love doesn't do well, at least you're not embarrassed.'

One wrinkle tllen new to Beauvais, who'd been knee­deep in reissues for much of his time at Atlantic, was the process of making a record with a contemporary artist. "I wanted to sign Cyrus Chestnut. So I played a tune of his for Ahmet, and after four bars he said, 'Sign him. He's great!' I said, 'You haven't even heard the solo!' He said, 'I don't need to, I can tell from the intro he's a great player, go for it, how much is it going to cost?' So we discussed money, and I said, 'Who's going to produce this?' He said, 'What do you mean? You are!' I was like, 'I've never done this.' 'So what?' he said, 'It's not that difficult. You go, you book a studio, you bring in the musicians, they play, you press Record, and you're

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A vintage Mcintosh MC75, before and after restoration.

done, you know? It's easy. Nothing to it. You're a smart guy, you can figure it out. Good luck."'

For Atlantic's newly revived jazz slash what-Yves­liked department, Beauvais licensed records by Moondog and by Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora. He signed Chestnut, tenor saxophonist James Carter; guitll'ist Marc Ribot, and tnunpeter Olu Dara. Beauvais also had a hand in Marc Ribot's now-classic pair of albums with Los Cubanos Postiws, and a solo guitar record, Saints.

"I was very happy that Yves did the work he did. He was very good at it," Ribot says from his home in Brooklyn. 'To whatever extent Yves leaving the biz was a question of his personal choice, more power to him. But it's bad news for all of us that there isn't space now for people who are good at doing the work that record companies once did. It's not only a loss for the people involved, it's a loss for the culture in general. And rm not saying this because rm niive about questions of exploitation. Yves was great to work with. And he is a really cultured and intelligent person. He got out before the piracy thing shut the whole thing down, before the industry collapsed Maybe he had a crystal ball."

"When he produced recordings by new artists, Beauvais was an all-analog believer. "I made all my records analog to sound as good as possible. We'd record on multitrack tape, sometimes analog quarter-inch or analog half-inch. A lot of the jazz records I made were straight to two tracks-there was no mixing to be done. It was the old-fashioned way: you mix as you play, you can't fix mistakes, there's no net, you pick the best takes. It was only at mastering that stuff would get transferred to digital."

"While working on the last two records made by Modem Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis, Evolution I and II, Beauvais decided-on a whim, he says, and spurred by the rapidly multiplying ills of the record business-to apply to Columbia University's Business School. "I could see the writing on the wall. 1bis was 1998. Napster was starting. We were starting to lose market share. People were starting to be able to make copies of CDs. You could buy CD-Rs in stores. You'd see a stack of [blank] CD-Rs for 20 bucks. Then you'd go to the record stores and you could buy one [pre-recorded] CD for 20 bucks. The perceived value of the record became somewhat dicey in the consumer's mind, you know?"

Beauvais was 39 when he applied to Coltunbia U. That week, he got a call from an attorney who said that Columbia Records needed someone to run their jazz department and wanted to talk with him. He was offered both the job and a spot in the Business School. "The next thing, I have two months to decide: Columbia or Columbia?" He chose the record business, which he now says was "not the best decision I ever made, I think. I never quite found my place there."

Soon after taking the job at Columbia, Beauvais moved to Los Angeles. After signing the Bad Plus and Derek Trucks, and making Blue Country Heart, a record with former Hot Tuna guitarist J orma Kaukonen that he calls "beautiful," Beauvais began to plot a way out.

''While I'm in LA~ I have a big Conrad-Johnson amp. It

stereophile.com • April 2013

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC

weighed 120 pounds. One day, it goes bust on me. Shipping it somewhere for repair was no fun at all. I called the jazz

~ and world-music ~ DJ [Tom Schnabel] ~ at KCRW, who is ~ a major audiophile, l and said I need

someone to come to my house, tell me what's wrong with the C-J and fix it on-site. He said, 'I've got the guy for you. And in the meantime, my assistant at KCRW has a Mcintosh amp she'd like to sell.'

"Now, I really like Mcintosh amps. I used to run MC30s in New York, and loved those very, very much. And so while my C-J is out of order, I'm calling her to buy her Mcintosh amp. She actually had a storage unit full of gear, and she faxed me a two-page list of nothing but classic tube gear, tons of speakers, tons of turntables. A good friend of hers had just had a stroke, and he'd been a collector, one of those hoarders of vintage tube gear. I bought the whole thing.

"So I started restoring these magnificent Mcintosh monoblocks as obsessively as folks restore vintage cars or vintage motorcycles. It's probably not the best business model, because you have a finite quantity of them, and it's an enormous amount of work. I take them apart entirely, rechrome the chassis, re-silk-screen, repaint the transformers, and I do all the electronic work inside. "When I'm done, I want the Mcintosh in question to look and sound like we assume it would have when it came out of the plant in 1952, '53, '54.

"My interest in tubes is linked to my CD remastering. "When I was remastering the CS&N boxed set with [engineer] Joe Gastwirt, I noticed there was a certain brittleness, a certain hardness to the sound. To make the tapes more musical, he used a lot of tubes in his chain, tube EQs and tube compressors, to kind of warm things up. He lent me a pair of Mcintosh MC30s. I had never heard sound like that before. It doesn't completely compensate for the brittleness of 16-bit/44.lkHz CDs, but it certainly helps the midrange, the soundstage is substantially larger, [and] there's a little bit of harmonic distortion that is very pleasant to the ear. There's a warmth and musicality that, for my money, is not equaled with solid-state. There is a little spark on top that I find with tube gear that I have never heard with solid-state."

Now that Beauvais's livelihood no longer hinges on the success of a Led Zeppelin boxed set but on his ability to resurrect vintage amps, has his personal equation between sound quality and musical content-the statement on his website-shifted at all?

"Hal Willner, the producer, I heard him say something once that was so profound. This engineer he was working with was tinkering with the bass sound of a recording for hours and hours and hours, and Hal was running out of patience. The engineer turned to him and said, 'So how about now? How does this mix sound? Do you like this better or that better? This mike or that mike?' And Hal turned to him and said, 'Sound is good enough.' Not this sound is good enough. Sound is good enough." •

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