Show Reports

Welcome to Part 6 of my Capital Audiofest 2024 show report, the last installment before the Thanksgiving holiday takes full hold! Here we go. . .

ROBYATT AUDIO
Robin Wyatt always brings enthusiasm to his hi-fi show demos. In fact, his demo rooms are among those rare ones that, upon entering, you never know just what you might hear. This time, it was deadmau5’s “2448” (from the electronic house/producer/DJ’s December Mau5trap 2016 release, W:/2016ALBUM/, blaring from the latest Quad ESL-2912 electrostatic loudspeakers ($11,995). It was Sunday nearing the end of the show, and Wyatt was, for just a moment, in absentia. (When the cat’s away, the Mau5 will play.) When Wyatt returned, we’d already switched back to vinyl — namely, my 12in single of Kraftwerk’s “The Telephone Call,” an extended remix of a great song from their 1986 Kling Klang LP Electric Café that was also playing through those Quad speakers at high volume (though said volume had been turned down slightly, at my request).

Wyatt (seen above, in fine spirits) told me about his room’s setup that centered around his new turntable, the VPI HW-RA ($17,995) that was created in conjunction with VPI’s Mat Weisfeld, a model that employs VPI’s direct-drive platform. The “RA” in the table’s name stands for “roundabout,” and/or Robyatt Audio. For now, Wyatt added, the RA table is a one-off preproduction model.

On the RA table’s armboard was a Bird of Prey tonearm ($15,950) that comes with a straight armwand as well as a J-type wand with an SME collet for mounting with a headshell or an Ortofon SPU, Wyatt said. The Bird of Prey arms are available in 12in, 16in, or 18in lengths. Also included are the consumer’s choice of balanced, single-ended, or field coil wiring.

Wyatt told me more about the Bird of Prey arm’s unique look. “It is a magnetically stabilized, viscous-damped unipivot design,” he explained. “It looks like a fixed-gimbal tonearm, but it’s actually a unipivot.” Around its brass cup is a ring magnet, and there’s a brass bar with a magnet on either side. This design allows the arm to move up and down easily, but its side-to-side motion is restricted by the opposing forces of the magnets. It works as a unipivot would, but it also has better stability — i.e., no yaw.

If the user wants to mount a J- or S-type armwand, the Bird of Prey arm’s design enables adjustments to offset the inherent tilting towards the inside. In that case, you can move the outrigger weights — one to the back, the other to the front — to prevent/offset this leaning. As Wyatt confirmed, you can load it precisely on the pivot point to prevent it from leaning one way or the other.

In the Robyatt setup, the straight armwand was outfitted with a moving coil Tzar DST V1 phono cartridge ($10,000) with about a 0.25mV output that’s a Siberian-made repro of the Neumann DST 62 cartridge — “a long-gone but very revered phono cartridge,” as Wyatt described it.

Normally, the Tzar DST V1 cart has an aluminum body, but Wyatt commissioned one in white Corian that he calls “The White Knight” — and it’s his personal one too. They also make a Version 2 (V2) in walnut and brass, with slightly different sonic characteristics. The cart’s signal was fed into a new product, the Robyatt Audio RA1 step-up transformer ($995), ahead of moving magnet (MM) phono preamp of the Java Hi-Fi Double Shot integrated amp ($15,995). The RA1 SUT has tube sockets, so you can plug different transformers in and out. Robyatt Audio also makes balanced transformers, including a 1:20 and a 1:10, in addition to bespoke transformers to exactly match a given cartridge’s specific impedance.

The Tzar DST V1 cart tracks at a mighty 6g. The downside is, it needs retipping every 600 hours or so, which will run you just under $1,000. “It’s a bit like buying a Ferrari — it requires some maintenance,” Wyatt noted. “It’s not cheap, but it’s not a big deal. If you can afford ten-grand to buy it, you can afford to retip it.” (Fair point, so to speak.) The upside is, the cart played a key role riding deep in the groove, delivering amazing slam, speed, and attack on my Kraftwerk “Telephone Call” 12-inch. The foundation seemed solid, and the background was dead quiet. Every beat hit hard.

It was nearing the end of the show, and I figured I shouldn’t listen to the whole track, as it is an extended version — so I stood up to ask Wyatt to stop the record. But then the next section of “The Telephone Call” kicked in with so much energy that I sat right back down. Wyatt laughed. I did too. The song (and the Robyatt system) delivered that kind of wow factor — not to mention a whole lot of fun.

More to come, following the Thanksgiving break — hope you all enjoy yours!

Author bio: Julie Mullins, a lifelong music lover and audiophile by osmosis who grew up listening to her father’s hi-fi gear, is also a contributing editor and reviewer on our sister site, Stereophile, for whom she also writes the monthly Re-Tales column. A former fulltime staffer at Cincinnati’s long-running alt-weekly CityBeat, she hosts a weekly radio show on WAIF called On the Pulse.

For more of our CAF 2024 coverage, go to Part 1 of Julie’s show report here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and also see Ken Micallef’s turntable video extravaganza here.