Jeff Fox, the gregarious owner of Command Performance AV, which is located in Falls Church, VA, knows how to throw a big party. This past weekend he opened up his store for a special event to demo the new version of the megabuck Clearaudio Statement turntable. The ‘table was mated with a passel of Aesthetix gear and Focal loudspeakers plus wires from Raidho. The cartridge in use was the always impressive MC Gold Statement, which retails for a cool $15,000.
A passel of folks from the high-end showed up for the event, including Clearaudio president Robert Suchy and Musical Surroundings’ Garth Leerer. Leerer, who recently returned from a trip to Paris where he went record hunting, always carries along some vinyl gems. When I visited Fox’s reference room, Leerer was spinning a fine vintage pressing of Sonny Rollins on the Statement’s new Delrin platter.
Delrin? Oh, yes. The acrylic that once constituted the Statement’s platter has been banished, and it’s all to the good as near as I could tell. Acrylic produces a tizzy sound, in my experience. On this rig, bass punch was prodigious, imaging excellent, and dynamics simply off the charts. A passel of other changes have also been made to the Statement, including a new version of the linear tracking tonearm which also appears now to operate sans acrylic. You can mount up to four tonearms on the Statement, a nifty feature that should be enough to allow you to mix the sonic palette however you desire.
Readers of TAS may recall that the late Harry Pearson swooned over the Statement’s performance when it was in situ at Sea Cliff. So did Donald Saltzman when he reviewed it at length in the magazine. There can be little doubt, after hearing the upgraded version strut its stuff, that the Statement continues to make quite a statement.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
The trumpet has influenced my approach to high-end audio. Like not a few audiophiles, I want it all—coherence, definition, transparency, dynamics, and fine detail.
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