Stereophile – August 2019

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LISTENING

few clicks.

I happened to install the Tzar at a

time when I was proofreading the ma-

terial for Stereophile’s June issue. Forgive

me for making an observation I’ve

made before, but while playing records

with the Tzar, that work was flatly

impossible: Every record I played com-

manded all of my attention. If you’re

looking for a phono-based system that

can, when necessary, be used to supply

background music, the Tzar DST is a

terrible choice.

But for a system where the prime

directive is to allow every recording

to sound as electrically real as it did at

the moment of its making—a system

that can be, in Andy Partridge’s words,

a wisdom hotline from the dead back

to the living—the Tzar remains the

same superb choice it was when I first

heard it. To those who can spend such

a record-breaking amount of money

on a phono cartridge, I recommend it

wholeheartedly and enduringly.

when new or after periods of dor-

mancy—and indeed, the sound was

quite good but not stunningly so. Yet by

the second movement, plucked strings

grabbed my attention in a manner

that’s rare with even the finest stereo

cartridges: Those sounds, though

gentle, were undeniably physical.

(That’s commonplace with my favorite

mono cartridge, the EMT OFD 25, but

with stereo it’s rare.)

I finished that LP and a couple of

others and then sat down to devote all

of my attention to Sonny Rollins’s Way

Out West (Contemporary/Original

Jazz Classics OJC-337). It was mag-

nificent: great tone and presence from

Rollins’s tenor sax, perfect tunefulness

and momentum from Ray Brown’s

double bass, and, most notably of all,

unworldly good impact from Shelly

Manne’s drums and cymbals. Plus, that

double bass was bigger than I’d ever

before heard it. Almost everything I

love about this LP was turned up a

time with the second-least-expensive

amplifier in the current (2019) Shindo

Laboratory line, the Montille CV

391 ($6995). This hand-wired tube

amp was introduced in 2012 as a

slightly higher-powered and some-

what different-sounding alternative to

the standard Shindo Montille,^3 which

mage T1 or T2.

It’s also worth noting that, since the

time I first tried the Tzar DST, its ap-

pearance has improved. It was always

well made: A cartridge with such tight

tolerances—the gaps the coils move

within are incredibly small—has to be

in order for it to work at all. But now

the Tzar boasts a more finely finished

aluminum body and neater joins

between its various parts. The current

Tzar looks more like a five-figure car-

tridge instead of just sounding like one.

With the Tzar installed in an

Acoustical Systems Arché headshell

and fastened to my EMT 997 tonearm,

its output connected to the Neumann

transformer, I lowered its stylus to the

lead-in groove of the Pro Arte Piano

Quartet’s 1966 recording of Fauré’s

Piano Quartet in C minor (L’Oiseau-

Lyre SOL 289). I didn’t expect a lot

right off the bat—experience tells me

that some components, especially

transducers, need a bit of running in

SHINDO MONTILLE CV 391

In February of this year, thanks to a

loan from Mystic, Connecticut, dealer

Old Forge Studio, I was able to spend