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Vinyl Asylum: REVIEW: VPI Industries JMW9T Tone Arms by amioutaline?

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REVIEW: VPI Industries JMW9T Tone Arms

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Model: JMW9T
Category: Tone Arms
Suggested Retail Price: $999
Description: 9
Manufacturer URL: VPI Industries

Review by amioutaline? on August 19, 2013 at 20:19:45
IP Address: 96.37.28.107
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for the JMW9T


Last month, motive, opportunity and money came together to enable the purchase of a "high end" tone arm. After a lot of dithering and with my choices narrowed to the JMW or SME 309, I opted for the far less expensive (with an eye toward a cartridge upgrade) JMW.

It's been a lot of work getting to this point where I'm confident I'm getting the most from it and my experience may be important to others. Or maybe I'm just slow.

My HW-19 is a MK III that had been upgraded to a MK IV by an acquaintance and came with a Super Armboard drilled for and fitted with an SME III. I soon sold the SME and it's armboard and began making wooden armboards for the various arms I tried since. My MK IV platter, and there are several, is the 1 1/2" thick one which meant some arms wanted a Super, 1" thick board while oters, the Rega RB-250 for instance, just 3/4". I fashioned boards from Walnut and Cherry and even gave some away at Ribfest 2012.

I mention all this because the JMW 9T sits very tall on it's base; mounted on a 3/4" thick board and sitting all the way down, it's impossible to level the headshell. During some e-mail correspondence with VPI, Harry Weisfeld personally wrote to offer milling down the base to fix the problem, which fix, unfortunately would eliminate the flywheel VTA adjustment. I thanked him and declined; I had already come up with a solution that I wanted to try.

I already knew that wooden armboards changed the sound of playback compared to acrylic. I was also intrigued by the resurgence of metal platters on high end tables, particularly the aluminum/stainless composites. For 30 bucks I bought an 1/4" thick, armboard sized aluminum plate which I machined and bonded to an .040 thick sheet of EAR SD-40 damping material on the bottom and contact glued some cherry veneer to the top.

I substituted the thinner metal board for the 3/4" cherry and set VTA as high as it was before to get a sense of what the aluminum was doing. As I suspected, the sound was "livelier" but not a big deal. Being able to set correct VTA and SRA made a far larger difference. Me being me, I already have a 1/4" piece of Walnut plywood waiting to become another arm board.

A Unipivot arm takes some getting used to for sure; the JMW 9T has several adjustments that work in concert to insure that you'll spend a lot of time making them. 2 Allen keys come with to adjust the base pillar height, Balance weights, cueing assembly height, tone arm rest height and cueing ledge orientation. No matter which operation you adjust, you'll reach for the wrong size key. And every adjustment necessitates changing something you thought already done, especially cueing.

What's brilliant about this Unipivot is the way Azimuth is so easy to nail: you make the coarse adjustment with a rod that fits into a slot atop the headshell then use the cardboard sleeve it came in, sitting on the record and held against the front of the headshell, as a "winding stick" to determine which side is low. Turning the balance weight ring on the low side toward the rear fixes the Azimuth on level. Once done, at least in my case, eliminating sibilance does the fine tuning.

Now that I have a Unipivot and appreciate the way it has no bias in any direction, I can't imaging going back to a conventional arm. Record after acoustic instrument record, I was instantly aware of three main attributes:
1. low bass, already a strength of my JBL 2226 mid-woofers, became more "live" in texture.

2. front-to-back soundstage was greatly improved...for the first time I heard piano concerto keyboard notes correctly portrayed; high notes front and low notes rear.

3. the spaces between tracks are eerily silent, that "turn me over" pause between the end of the last track and the lead out groove, silent.

None of those three are subtle differences and together they clearly say that the JMW 9T is conveying more music and less, far less, distortion.

After I played my usual belwethers, "88 Basie Street", "Blue" and the Cliburn Brahms Second, I began taking records from everywhere, some, like "Sgt. Peppers" I haven't listened to in years and appreciated as never before. Keith Richards riffs on the new release of "Hot Rocks" are crazy good, Van Zandt at "The Old Quarter" sounds so natural, the brass choir on the E. Power Biggs Gabrielli album so....brassy ...and so on.

There's no doubt in my mind that the JMW 9T is above the threshold of truly High-End tone arms, that opinion reinforced by my most recent acquisition, the ZYX R50 cartridge, but a subject for it's own review.


Product Weakness: Can no longer use my VPI Dustcover, the first line of Feline Defense; already lost a cartridge ;-(
Product Strengths: Soundstage, tone and texture, ability to get the all-important Azimuth right


Associated Equipment for this Review:

Amplifier: Single-ended, direct-coupled Parafeed 2 watt 45 Amp
Preamplifier (or None if Integrated): Passive
Sources (CDP/Turntable): VPI HW-19 MK IV
Speakers: 4 Pi
Cables/Interconnects: Darwin and White Lightning
Music Used (Genre/Selections): Classical Rock, Jazz and Classical
Room Size (LxWxH): 15 x 12 x 8
Room Comments/Treatments: several 2'x4' OC rigid fiberglass panels on stand-offs
Time Period/Length of Audition: 30 days
Type of Audition/Review: Product Owner




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Topic - REVIEW: VPI Industries JMW9T Tone Arms - amioutaline? 20:19:45 08/19/13 ( 14)