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JV Is Off to Japan!

JV Is Off to Japan!

You guys won’t be hearing from me regularly on the Forum threads for a short while (which may come as a great relief to some). On Friday I’m going to Tokyo with Tangram Audio’s Yujean Kang to visit a couple of high-end designers/manufacturers who are relatively little known over here in the States but are highly regarded in Japan.

The first is Kiyaoki Imai of Audio Tekne, whose fabulous TEA-2000 phonostage I use as a reference and have awarded Golden Ears and Editors’ Choice awards. Among other delicacies, Mr. Imai makes a $130,000 phonostage! (Yes, you are reading that correctly.) And I’m going to get to hear it! Not at Mr. Imai’s shop—it’s a truly custom-built item, too expensive for Mr. Imai to keep “on the shelf”—but at the home of an (I assume wealthy) Japanese audiophile, who also has some of Mr. Imai’s choicest other gear (all of which is exquisitely hand-built and priced along the lines of the phonostage). If you’re interested in perusing the Audio Tekne line, go to http://www.tangramaudio.com/content.htm and take a look. (BTW, not everything that Mr. Imai offers costs a fortune. He and his wife make some hand-wound Litz-wire speaker cable and interconnect that I think is terrific—and very reasonably priced. For which, see my blog at www.avguide.com/blog/affordable-cable-thats-good-the-high-priced-stuff.)

Mr. Imai’s products are tube (often 300B), but I will also be visiting a premier solid-state company that goes by the unlikely name of Technical Brain. (If you want to know more about Technical Brain, go to www.technicalbrain.co.jp/en/.) Like Audio Tekne, Technical Brain is an artisanal Japanese high-end design and manufacture firm that, by report, makes transistor gear that, like Audio Tekne’s tube offerings, is rare and expensive and fabulous-sounding. Its TB Zero Series amps and preamps have a heckuva reputation. Indeed, my friend and colleague and TAS Editor-in-Chief Robert Harley actually heard and examined some Technical Brain components at a CES several years ago and when he found out I was going to visit the company he got excited: “The gear was built like Soulution or FM Acoustics! Fabulously well-made, technically innovative, and great sounding.” I can’t wait to hear (and possibly review) some of it!JV Is Off to Japan!

If I can get access to the Internet, I will post pix and comments on-line from Japan. I will also write an on-line summary of my trip and a special report in TAS that covers what I saw and heard.

Until later, sayonara!

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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