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Pear Audio Analogue Little John Turntable and Cornet 2 Tonearm

Pear Audio Analogue Little John Turntable and Cornet 2 Tonearm

Reviewing this Little John turntable and Cornet 2 tonearm ensemble from Pear Audio Analogue was for me an exercise in déjà vu, for which there’s a clear basis in reality. In conception, construction, and appearance the pairing recalls the Nottingham Analogue Interspace Jr. turntable/Ace Interspace Arm combination that I reviewed in these pages ten years ago. Nottingham Analogue is a British company founded by Tom Fletcher, a man who started building turntable parts as a teenager. Over the course of some forty years his company sold tens of thousands of turntables. Illness—from the cancer that would eventually take his life in 2010—forced Fletcher to sell Nottingham. Long before then, however, he had established himself as an analog guru whose products acquired a sizable and steadfast following that persists to this day. When the Well Tempered Turntable that Pear Audio’s Peter Mezek represented became unavailable, he sought out Fletcher and soon was born the Pear Audio Analogue “Blue” line of record-playing components (named, it is said, after Mezek’s dog, of whom Fletcher was fond). Mezek and his domestic importer, Michael Vamos of Audio Skies, claim that Pear’s are the only true evolution of Fletcher’s work, but at least three other companies (including Nottingham) market or have marketed Fletcher-designed turntables. Although the cosmetics are different and there are changes in parts, materials, and aspects of implementation and construction methods, the Little John and Cornet 2 strike me as essentially a rebadged, updated, and mostly improved Interspace Jr. and Ace. 

At the heart of Fletcher’s thinking about turntables are two concepts: low-torque motors in combination with heavy platters and a proper “marriage of materials” to ensure what he calls “perfect phasing.” The former is the easier to explain: The lower the torque of the motor, the smaller and less powerful it needs to be, thus the less it vibrates and the less said vibration is passed along to the stylus-groove interface. A heavy platter can be better damped to absorb or otherwise suppress vinyl resonances and, owing to inertia, is more stable and less susceptible to speed fluctuations (all other things being equal). Trouble is, a low-torque motor isn’t strong enough to bring a heavy platter up to speed, so Fletcher’s novel solution has the end user supply an assist by starting the platter spinning by hand. Once up to speed, remarkably little torque is required to keep it at speed. As I reported in my Nottingham review, I never tired of this little exercise and it amused me again with the Little John. A caveat, though: Don’t be afraid to put a little vigor into the start-up spin. An overshot platter will quickly settle back down to the correct speed, but an undershot one may never get there. 

When we turn to the notion of “perfect phasing” the explanations by Fletcher and/or his disciples start to get a little fuzzy. Here is the Pear Audio website: “Matching materials able to control resonance naturally and that are sonically in phase . . . [create] a turntable in sonic harmony…no frequency is overly diminished or amplified. No frequency is overly damped or allowed to sustain. Every bit of energy is carefully managed across the spectrum, from the motor itself, through the tonearm and in the stylus as it is driven by the grooves on the record.” And finally, “Each material, on its own, might be common and unremarkable, but the way materials perform together, to maintain the proper phase of energy throughout the system, is how the magic begins.” As prose this is so vague, even vaporous as to suggest mystique mongering or cult building; as explanation it’s so imprecise as to render impossible any sort of informed commentary or judgment on Fletcher’s theories. In fairness, these statements were not written by Fletcher himself, though they quote from and do not betray the sense of things he said in interviews and other public forums. But since he isn’t around to clarify or defend himself, and the proof anyhow is in the listening, it behooves me to move on to the gear itself and its performance. 

Pear Audio Analogue Little John Turntable and Cornet 2 Tonearm

Product Description and Features
Priced at $2995, the Little John is the entry level of a line of five turntables in the Pear Audio Blue line. It’s the only one with a base/plinth made from engineered wood; in this it differs from the Nottingham Interface Jr., which was MDF, and also from the four Pear Audio models above it, which use a special wood, said to have been discovered by Fletcher after a long search (the company will not divulge the name of the wood—more mystique mongering?). It’s a two-layered plinth, with a selection of attractive finishes. A pair of grooves in the rim of the weighty metal platter are for the belt and a thick rubber band for additional damping. A foam platter mat is supplied, something I applaud, by the way, inasmuch as I’ve never cared for the sound of any turntable that places the LP directly on a metal platter (whatever putative improvements there might be in bass and transient response are more than negated by the unpleasant edginess of the sound). There is no clamp or record weight, as Fletcher felt these bring no improvement to his designs. Three adjustable, rubber-tipped feet serve triple duty as support, leveling, and some isolation. The small outboard motor with power supply and pulley is placed under the plinth on the same surface as the turntable; the turntable is then placed over the motor, its cylindrical housing and pulley guided through an opening in the plinth and positioned so as not to touch the perimeter of the cut-out. Once done it makes for a trim, elegant package. There is no on/off switch; instead, when you stop the platter (by hand), the motor remains on (if you touch it you can feel it still vibrating) but incapable of rotating the platter until you initiate the spin. Speed change (33 and 45) is available by repositioning the belt. There is no provision for speed adjustment, but a check with a strobe disc revealed it was spot-on (and a few rechecks throughout the review period revealed no drift). Optional accessories include a dust cover (kudos for that!), substitute feet with sharp tips, and an outboard power supply ($1995) that enables speed adjustment and obviates the need for repositioning the belt when changing speeds. I evaluated the stock unit.

Pear Audio offers two tonearms: the Cornet 1 at $1495 and the Cornet 2 at $2495. You get a $500 break on either ’arm when purchased with any Pear Audio turntable, the combination as reviewed coming in at $2995. Rather unprepossessing in appearance, the Cornet 2 is a unipviot with some unique features, not all of them salutary (more on this in a moment). The issues unipivots have of maintaining azimuth across the record are here addressed, according to the Pear Audio website, “with a special material, developed with viscosity properties, that does not flow and does not require ‘settling time.’” U.S. distributor Michael Vamos of Audio Skies says that “This is not a traditional unipivot. Rather, the arm’s range of azimuth is limited to nearly vertical by a roller bearing on the unipivot shaft and a pair of metal bars around which it rotates.” The tube is made from carbon fibers that run the length as opposed to being wrapped around it, the claim being this “greatly increases the strength, resonance control, and rigidity of the arm.” Apart from a stylus force gauge (balance is static), everything necessary for installing a phono pickup, including alignment protractor, is supplied. Like the Nottingham’s, the instructions here are hardly models of clarity, but anyone with a modicum of experience should have no difficulty getting it set up and running, save for the issues I’m about to detail in the next two paragraphs.

There are three really irritating carryovers from the Interspace Ace ’arm which are no less irritating in the Cornet. One of them is the lack of a finger lift, which I really hate. Fortunately, the Cornet’s cueing, like the Ace’s, is dead-on; better still, as we go to press the importer Michael Vamos informs me that he will provide a fingerlift free for the asking to any purchaser who desires one. I happen to have a spare fingerlift, and I used it with absolutely no discernable sonic penalties. As for the other two, I’ll just quote from my Nottingham review, substituting the current names: “Inexcusably stupid, however, is the absence of any means of securing the arm when not in use. Admittedly, Pear Audio flanks the cueing platform with posts that prevent the arm from swinging too far in either direction (though they’re hardly foolproof); but if the cueing platform isn’t in the up position, the stylus could still be damaged. And relocating this setup requires lifting it and walking very carefully, otherwise the arm bounces around like a ping-pong ball. It gets worse: there is an antiskating mechanism but not a single word anywhere in the ‘instructions’ about how to set correct values. A bit of Internet research informed me Pear Audio suggests setting it by ear. Yes, of course, I too use my ears to set antiskating, but only to trim it in, not to find the correct ballpark setting in the first place, which is the job of the engineers to establish consistent with arm geometry, bearings, tracking force, etc.”

 

There is more. First, for what my experience may be worth, I wound up positioning the antiskating mechanism more or less in its center position and had no mistracking. This worked with my pickups, but that doesn’t mean it will with yours. If uncertain, use a good test record or else defeat it entirely, since better too little or none at all than even slightly too much. But to this I must add that according to Vamos, the Cornet’s antiskating mechanism is unique inasmuch as it will compensate for the way the force varies, as it always does, across the record. I have no way of verifying that this works as claimed, but its implementation does look different from any others in my experience and, as noted, once set, no mistracking occurred on even my most difficult records. Second, the instructions actually recommend using a twist-tie if you need to move the turntable; but surely nobody at Pear Audio can possibly believe there is a sonic penalty for a tonearm post? Third, one thing that was really frustrating about the Nottingham ’arm is that its cables were so extremely sensitive to hum pickup that I was unable to find any cable position or routing path that completely eliminated it. I’m happy to report that the Cornet 2 completely scotches this problem, even with volume control flat out. Fourth, for a nominal fee Pear Audio will custom-drill armboards for almost any tonearm, but most users, I suspect, will opt for one of the Cornets. Fletcher believed—and I tend to concur—that ideally an ’arm and turntable should be designed as a unit. 

For the listening evaluations I used mostly my reference Ortofon Windfeld, a very neutral pickup, and for a short while an Ortofon Cadenza Bronze, similar but with a slightly more romantic sound. Despite the fact that the Windfeld costs almost as much as the whole Pear Audio setup and the Bronze almost as much as the ’arm, the Cornet 2 proved perfectly capable of handling either pickup.

The Sound
The first record I cued down—Jacintha’s Fire and Rain (Groove Note)—brought a smile to my face and that in a nutshell pretty much describes my experience with the Little John/Cornet 2. If I had to search for an adjective or complex of adjectives to describe it a little more precisely, I’d call it extremely pleasing: a bit warm without being mushy; rounded and dimensional without being soft or fuzzy; very smooth, even sweet yet not lacking in profile or enough stringency if the source calls for it; natural, easeful, unforced, and musical against a background of black velvet (record surfaces permitting). The overriding impression of a very organic presentation that keeps attention focused on the music rather than on reproduction per se, such that for the first few weeks I was too entertained to bother taking notes. This impression was sustained through a variety of sources: the vinyl reissues of Bernstein’s Vienna Beethoven set (DG) and first Mahler cycle (Sony), Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West (Acoustic Sounds), Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers (Capitol original, noisy surfaces but pretty sound), Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Dream (Acoustic Sounds), Lyn Stanley’s fabulous new London Calling (see my review elsewhere in this issue), and too many more to list. 

When I donned my reviewer’s cap and slipped into analytical mode, I found the Little John/Cornet 2 navigated itself well through most of the usual audiophile categories with pretty high colors. Vividly recorded voices—like the aforementioned Jacintha, Doris Day in Hooray for Hollywood, Ella Fitzgerald in Let No Man Write My Epitaph, any Lyn Stanley release on vinyl, the singers on Joel Cohen’s Sing We Noel—are brought forth with a tactile sense of presence, and the same applies to instruments, whether soloists such as Robert Sherman’s Chopin’s Last Waltz, Regis Pasquier’s Bach sonatas, Ali Akbar Kahn’s Morning and Evening Ragas (Connoisseur Society original—why doesn’t somebody bring out a vinyl reissue of this musically and sonically glorious album?), the duets and other ensembles on Sasha Matson’s Tight Lines (Stereophile), Webster and Edison on Ben and Sweets (Groove Note reissue), and du Pré and Barenboim on the Beethoven cello sonatas (Vintage EMI). Soundstaging on big stuff like the Bernstein Carmen or the Solti Ring stretches across a fairly wide panorama and exhibits real depth if it exists in the recording. Imaging is precise with an overall impression of solidity that is, well, really solid, e.g., the disposition of star vis-à-vis supporting musicians in the opening of the Belafonte at Carnegie Hall discs (Acoustic Sounds reissue) or the ensemble wandering in at the beginning of The Christmas Revels (Revels Records), the leader calling everyone to attention while banging on a what sounds like a tin pot with a metal spoon. You can close your eyes and easily visualize the event. 

I’ve already alluded to the background quietness of this combination, especially if your records are well cared for and clean, all the more remarkable since the plinth is very microphonic. Tap it, even lightly, and you hear through it the system, but as a sharp thump that is gone immediately with no lingering resonance. If your records are not so clean, then the way it handles the usual assortment of ticks, clicks, and pops is good without being outstanding. When it comes to resolution, this setup is as detailed as I desire, but if you’re the sort who has to hear every breath intake, hiccup, or chair squeak in the back row, then you might want to look elsewhere. 

So far so good, indeed, pretty wonderful in fact. However, there is a definite character to the sound of this setup, and it derives from what appears to be going on at the extremes of the frequency range. Regular readers of mine will know that rising top ends are not to my taste—if anything, I prefer a mild slope to even a little rise. Compared to my reference setup with the same pickups and to other setups I’ve had long experience with, the Little John/Cornet sounds to me as if the high frequencies are being rolled off, pulled down, or otherwise diminished just a little too much. Meanwhile, the bottom-end reach of the bass is good enough, but it is definitely on the warm, even plummy side. 

 

Let me describe these effects in greater detail with reference to examples, starting with the Bernstein Carmen. This is a spectacular recording that truly suggests a theatrical experience in an opera house. Throughout the whole first half of Act IV (side six), the triangles really ring out with dazzling glitter while the cymbals clash with fireworks-like brilliance. To be sure, the sonics on this recording are undeniably on the bright side, so the cymbals are certainly brash in the Toreador song and the triangles are more prominent than you would likely hear from most seats in the venue. On my reference, a Basis 2200 turntable with Vector IV tonearm and the Ortofon Windfeld, which costs about four times that of the Pear Audio, these characteristics are clearly audible, the triangles almost leaping out at you from the speakers, the cymbal clashes’ explosions of light and color with seemingly limitless space above and around them. With the Little John/Cornet 2, all this sounds as if a treble control had been dialed back to 10 or 11 o’clock, the impression of space and air a bit contracted, diminished, perhaps even very slightly veiled. Something similar happens on a completely different piece of music: The electronically applied reverberation in several cuts of Paul Simon’s Graceland doesn’t open out with the impression of spaciousness, however artificial it may be, that I know is there, sounding by comparison a little too contained. The bells at the beginning of Adam Makowicz’s The Name is Makowicz on a direct-to-disc Sheffield are lovely yet they don’t quite sparkle with the crystalline clarity that I have heard on several other setups. 

At the bottom of the spectrum, the Carmen boasts a warm and ample bass, but it’s a little boomy, even whompy; with the Pear Audio that whompiness is just a little bit more whompy. The percussion, whether instrumental or electronically generated, on Graceland may not go super deep, but it can have pretty remarkable slam and definition. The Pear Audio does very well by it, but with less force and sheer punch than I’ve heard on several other setups. Likewise, Joe Ore’s bass on Monk’s Dream: It’s there with the Pear Audio, perfectly audible, tuneful, pitch perfect with good definition. On the reference, it’s all that and better: bolder and more assertive, opening out with exceptional clarity, articulation, definition, and pitch differentiation—indeed, the whole quartet is reproduced with a greater sense of space around the musicians in a more vibrant, dynamic performance.

What all this suggests is that the Little John/Cornet 2’s sonic personality is almost classic yin in Harry Pearson’s still useful yin/yang  dichotomy: smooth, warm, romantic, a little dark. I have no wish to make too much of these tonal anomalies. For one thing, their effects are not in the least crude or gross, rather mild and for the most part unobtrusive, while they may even be heard as virtues by many (among whom I number myself when it comes to very bright recordings or if I’m simply in that kind of mood). For another, many listeners might not even notice them in the absence of comparisons. For a third, to the extent that they “err,” it is on the side of listenability and musicality. 

But I call attention to them for three reasons. First, while any given tonearm and/or turntable has a perceivable effect, however subtle, on the performance of any given pickup, it is rare in my experience that an ’arm and a ’table alter a pickup’s tonal profile to even the relatively small degree that this Pear Audio setup does. Second, Pear Audio’s literature makes a point of claiming no that “frequency is overly diminished or amplified” or “overly damped or allowed to sustain” by its products, but this is a claim that manifestly does not survive scrutiny. (My suspicion is that the Cornet 2 is far more responsible for these tonal characteristics than the turntable. My colleague Andre Jennings discovered similar characteristics in his review of the Cornet 2 on the Kid Thomas turntable, Pear Audio’s flagship, as did Art Dudley with the Cornet 2 on the Kid Howard turntable, second from the top in the line. Third, inasmuch as it’s proving increasingly difficult in our day and age to find brick-and-mortar stores where components can actually be auditioned and compared, perhaps this information will prove useful for the purposes of system building and component matching. 

Let me also say that I grant it may be unfair to compare these two setups, the Basis components costing somewhere between three and four times what those from Pear Audio do. However, the Cornet 2 is marketed as Fletcher’s statement tonearm, and the literature invites comparisons regardless of cost or design.

Summing Up
Putting my evaluation into a larger perspective, I return to my opening and reiterate how much pleasure this ensemble gave me. At four grand, the Little John/Cornet 2 lands smack into a popular and crowded price point, above budget gear yet below the level at which things begin to get prohibitively expensive. In the past year or so I’ve reviewed the Bryston BP-1 and my colleague Robert Greene the Technics SL-1200G, both costing the same four grand, each of us awarding them Golden Ears. If it’s high neutrality you’re after, plus overall precision and resolution, then I’d direct you to the Bryston. I’ve not heard the Technics, but from REG’s description, which I trust, it sounds as if it would satisfy similar preferences. But if you crave a setup that is at all times pleasing and musical, that almost always sounds nice, never offends, and is really, really enjoyable, you’d be wise to search out Pear Audio’s products. What they get right, they get so right you soon forget about everything else except the music.

Specs & Pricing

Cornet 2 tonearm
Length: 10″
Effective mass: 12.5 grams
Bearing: Unipivot
Price: $2495

Little John turntable
Drive: Belt
Suspension: Fixed
Speeds: 33.33 and 45rpm
Dimensions (approx.): 16.5″ x 5.5″ x 14.5″
Price: $2995

AUDIO SKIES (U.S. Distributor)
audioskies.com

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