Stereophile – August 2019

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VPI Cliffwood Phono Preamplifier

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Epos Acoustics K5

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ANALOG CORNER

My lunch and dinner plans, I was

informed, included meeting up with

tonearm designer Frank Schröder

(whom I’ve known for some time) and

Consolidated Audio Berlin’s Michael

Ulbrich—one of whose “Monster Can”

MC transformers I’m currently review-

ing: a nice coincidence. Later in the

afternoon, I got a private tour of Rainer

Maillard’s studio and cutting operation,

which turned out to be much more

useful than the next day’s very crowded

nonprivate one, which was part of the

Making Vinyl conference.

The studio includes the lacquer-

cutting facility equipped with several

reel-to-reel analog tape recorders

(including one I’d never seen before:

a 16-track, 2" Studio Magnetofon

STM-700), vintage mixing boards, a

fairly large, well-treated “live” room,

and a newly configured Dolby

Atmos-equipped surround-sound

room. Over the past few years,

Maillard has cut and released a series

of D2D records including a really fine

Gershwin solo piano recital by Katie

Mahan.^1 Lang Lang has called her a

“fabulous pianist.”

Maillard himself showed me and

played for me one D2D record that

in business class—and was out cold

shortly after dinner. I met Mr. Frank

Wonneberg outside the terminal door,

and he took me on a Berlin tour that

included the usual tourist stops, plus

some vinyl-centric ones, including one

at an auto repair shop in a somewhat

rundown section of a Berlin suburb

where, in 1903, Odeon Records was

founded. Odeon later developed the

world’s first two-sided record, pressing

it in a plant located in the building.

Wonneberg wove a complicated tale

involving Carl Lindström, a Swedish

inventor living in Berlin who began

building phonographs in 1893 under

the brand names Parlograph and Parlo-

phon, and later pressed records, out of

which came familiar labels like Okeh

(originally OkeH, named for Otto K.E.

Heinemann) and Parlophone. I’d been

off the plane only a few hours and,

thanks to a stranger, my head was spin-

ning at 33.3rpm.

It turned out that my host has writ-

ten a beautifully produced, heavy, now-

out-of-print coffee-table book, Grand

Zappa: Internationale Frank Zappa Discol-

ogy, as well as other highly regarded

vinyl-related books. I’d been picked up

by German vinyl royalty!

has not been released, but should be, if

only as a Record Store Day oddity: Last

year, Johnny Depp and members of his

band Hollywood Vampires (including

Alice Cooper and Joe Perry) paid a

visit to the Meistersaal. Maillard told

them about the direct-to-disc record-

ing process. The group dug it and

decided to make a live-in-the-studio

recording of “Heroes,” an homage to

David Bowie.

Lacquers should be plated within

24 hours, but there was so much

legal wrangling and hesitancy that

the Vampires cut sat in a refrigerator

for way too long before being plated.

Nevertheless, the test pressing Mail-

lard played for me still sounded great.

Musically, it cut a deep, swaggering

groove, with Depp producing a rich,

guttural, Bowie-ish vocal. The sound

was big and full. The group only cut

two tracks that day—perfect for an

RSD limited-edition 12" 45.

Making Vinyl Berlin

The Day 1 panel I participated in was

“Home Entertainment Trends According to

the Journalists.” My new friend Frank

1 See analogplanet.com/content/katie-mahan-plays-

gershwin-direct-disc.