During World War II, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin established a grouping of communists called the Lublin Committee. They formed the counterpoint to the London-based Polish government in exile. Once Stalin’s Red Army expelled the Nazis and occupied Poland, it installed the Lublin Poles in power, purging any democratic elements in Poland. It wasn’t until 1989, with the triumph of the Solidarity movement, that the communists were toppled from power and Poland freed from the Soviet yoke. Since then, Poland has experienced a dramatic comeback. Its economy is poised to become the 20^th largest in the world and its military the biggest in Europe.

A small but hardly negligible part of Poland’s resurgence has been—you guessed it—the emergence of a local high-end audio industry. Today, the annual Warsaw Audio-Video Show draws visitors from around the world, including our very own Michael Fremer, who has attended it for over a decade. According to Fremer, “it’s a family affair. Adam Mokrzycki, who is the show organizer, does a great job running it. It’s the biggest consumer show in the world next to Munich which is even bigger and more business oriented.”

One company based in Lublin that has played a significant role in pushing Poland into the vanguard of high-end audio is J.Sikora, a manufacturer of turntables and tonearms since 2007. The eponymous company is named after its founder, Janusz Sikora, an expert in metallurgy, whose son, Robert, is now taking a leading role at the company. An impassioned audiophile, Janusz eventually decided to turn his metallurgical expertise to designing and building turntables. The foundation of knowledge that he brought to the craft of constructing turntables is abundantly evidenced in their superb fit and finish.

Nowhere is this more the case than with the company’s flagship, the J.Sikora Reference turntable that Jeff Fox, the proprietor of Notable Audio (which imports the Sikora line), delivered and set up at my home. This bruiser weighs in at 238 pounds—the platter alone is just shy of 40 pounds—and sports four separate Pabst DC motors, each whirring away in tandem with multi-grooved Delrin pulleys to produce what sounds like rock-solid speed stability. The rap on multiple motors is that they produce more noise, but the Reference was ultra-quiet in operation. Part of that silence is due to its well-engineered separate power supply. Another part can be safely ascribed to the intricate composition of the platter, which is fabricated from cast iron, aluminum and Delrin and a top mat consisting of glass surrounding an aluminum disk. The whole shebang rests on an inverted ceramic ball bearing, an approach which more than a few turntable manufacturers favor, and the bearing rests on a platter base made up of aluminum, stainless steel, and bronze. Sikora has also further improved its proprietary tonearm by, among other things, reducing its weight and devising a new bearing composed of zirconium oxide. The result is the KV12 Max Zirconium Series tonearm.

To assess the new table, I ran it through the supremely quiet phono section of the battery-powered Dartzeel NHB-18NS preamplifier, which I coupled to either the new Octave Jubilee 300B-based monoblock amplifiers or the Dartzeel NHB-468 monoblock amplifiers. The cartridge that I deployed on the KV12 Max tonearm was the new and impressive Phasemation PP-5000. I plugged the Sikora power supply into a Stromtank 2500 Quantum Mk-II, which improved its performance even further.

Having previously reviewed the Sikora Standard Max table, I was curious to hear how much of a jump there would be in going to the company’s premier. I was impressed by the low noise floor and speed stability of the Standard version but voiced some reservations about the table’s Sikora tonearm. It sounded nimble but a bit lighter tonally, particularly in the bass, than I preferred. To my ears, the Kuzma 4Point that I also employed on the Standard was audibly superior. It quickly became clear to me that Sikora’s new KV12 MAX tonearm is far superior to the  standard KV12. It also was easy to discern that the reference turntable, while it didn’t make the Standard sound “broken,” as you often hear reviewers say, built on its strengths to offer a much more formidable sonic presentation—one that often surprised me with its accuracy and drive and sheer wallop.

What constitutes an accurate sound? One thing that my recent exposure to the direct-drive Oswalds Mill Audio K3 turntable brought home is that there can often be a subliminal blurring of transients with belt-drive tables. I’m not talking about anything as gross as notes running into one another; it’s a more subtle phenomenon. But there definitely was a clarity with the K3 that sounded, to my ears, unforced and natural.

One album in which this was forcibly obvious was a spectacularly good Deutsche Grammophon recording of Mozart’s chamber works performed by the Tokyo String Quartet. In the “Dissonance” quartet, the Sikora table nailed the sharp attacks of the violin and viola. This quartet opens with a 22-bar adagio that foreshadows the astringent character of the succeeding movements. At various points, the sensation of an abrupt end to a passage, a split second of silence, then the resumption of the music was utterly compelling. A slightly more prosaic but no less revealing LP was an old Cheech and Chong performance that features a number called “Sargent Stadenko,” which parodies a tenacious drug officer named Sgt. Abe Snidanko in Vancouver, who was apparently renowned as the “hippie nemesis.” While I realize that I may be violating the austere canons of this magazine in referencing a non-musical performance, I cannot help noting that the J.Sikora Reference did a superb job in capturing the sibilants enunciated by those two rogues, Cheech and Chong, including a whimsical line (which in my experience is not always easy for a turntable to decipher): “As Saint Dominic always said, `O Fili Mi Boni Beli Dominus Fobiscum Beni Sell It All His Dominos!’”

To carry the torture test forward, I next played one of the most treacherous brass albums, a recording on the Angel label that was released in 1980 and that features the legendary Maurice André and his former pupil Guy Touvron playing a variety of concertos for two trumpets by the baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni. This album has a tendency to fracture in the treble region, which is the lofty sphere where André and Touvron spend most of their time playing in these demanding concertos. (There is something to be said for digital recordings when it comes to brass instruments.) Indeed, I’ve often found it to be particularly difficult for analog recordings to capture more than one brass instrument playing in unison, and this album is no exception.

While the Sikora could not efface all the shrill characteristics of this LP, it did render it more than listenable, particularly in the adagio passages. In addition, the subtle but vital accompaniment of the harpsichord with the orchestra was rendered with enviable clarity, no small feat since it is a delicate instrument that can often get lost in the mix. What also came to the fore on this recording was an immediacy, a surging quality on both the strings and trumpets that endowed the music with a greater sense of realism and excitement. The J.Sikora is anything but a bland or soporific table; it delivers thrills and chills.

What more appropriate album to spin than Michael Jackson’s Thriller? On “Beat It,” I was struck by the precision with which the Reference table laid out the performers. Even more impressive was “Billie Jean.” Each instrumental section was firmly in its own pocket, including the bass line which was as taut as I’ve heard it. The Cabasa shaker that’s omnipresent on this album was also perfectly audible, never wavering. In fact, at some points, I swear you could count the beads on the shaker.

What this amounted to was an uncanny ability to disaggregate the music on an LP—in the best sense. I don’t mean that it offered up a confused hash, but the very reverse. A case in point is a Tone Poet reissue of a Pacific Jazz LP by the guitarist Joe Pass called For Django. It almost goes without saying that Pass, who later cut numerous albums on the Pablo label, offers riveting interpretations of such classics as “Rosetta” and “Limehouse Blues” on this album. But I was also riveted by the way in which the Sikora Reference presented Colin Bailey on the drums—the sound was so clean and forceful that it almost sounded as though you were in the studio listening along. Then there was an original Riverside pressing from 1975 (double deep groove for those of you who are counting), The Sound of Sonny: Sonny Rollins, that I recently snagged from local record dealer, Chris Armbruster, at the Capital Audio Fest and that sounded extremely vivid and crisp. It was simplicity itself to follow the fleet interplay on these bebop numbers, which featured musicians such as Roy Haynes on drums, Paul Chambers on bass, and Sonny Clark on piano. (What an all-star cast!) The Sikora never got confused or tripped up. Instead, it laid it all out with superb self-assurance.

Ditto for a recording that I also recently acquired, one showcasing the late jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis playing a variety of standards on an album called Heart of Gold, which was released on the Columbia label in 1991. On the Avantgarde Trios it sounded lush and inviting and atmospheric, much as you would hear in a jazz club. The Sikora nailed the piano transients, and the brushwork of the drums was once more altogether superior. Dynamics were off the charts—the piano built up to crescendos that were continuous and thunderous. It was a pleasure to hear such straightforward and unpretentious playing so clearly delineated.

On blockbuster classical recordings, the results were also quite satisfying. On the fabled Decca recording of Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite, I heard no diminution in the prowess of the Reference. On “Mars, the Bringer of War,” the bass drum shots were delivered with impressive oomph, the brass section sounded suitably threatening, and the string section held its own, particularly when it came to its sonic sheen on massed passages. Once more, the surging, propulsive characteristic of the music came through beautifully. And the tintinnabulatory effects on “Mercury, the Winged Messenger”? They were nothing short of divine.

The limitations of Lublin’s finest audio creation become clear when it’s contrasted with far more expensive turntables—I’m talking well into the six figures. Put bluntly, the Sikora reference doesn’t have the same grandeur, the sheer sweep that an OMA K3 or a TechDAS Air Force Zero will deliver. There’s something addictive about the power of those megabuck tables. But the Sikora has its own kind of lithe agility and speed, sonic purity, and dynamism that is very winning. Reference, indeed.  

Specs & Pricing

Rotation speeds: 33, 45 rpm
Number of tonearms: 1 (second tonearm optional)
Arm tower: 1
Dimensions: 22″ x 15″ x 22″
Weight: 238 lbs.
Price: $48,000 in gloss black, KV9 MAX tonearm $11,750, KV12 MAX tonearm $14,500

NOTABLE AUDIO PRODUCTS (U.S. Distributor)
115 Park Avenue, STE 2
Falls Church, VA. 22046
notableaudio.com