The TEAD Groove Plus SRX Mk. 2.5 Phono-stage
By Roy Gregory
Last century – life seemed so much simpler then. CD was nothing more than a noisy upstart and streaming was the result of music lovers and audiophiles heading for the Tower Records sale. There were fewer companies in the high-end, fewer products with which to get to grips and people still read magazines – and actually trusted them benough to let them establish equipment hierarchies. The Abso!ute Sound still stood for something and in its highest form, that meant the ‘HP review’, when the late, great Harry Pearson granted his imprimatur to whichever product he felt deserved a place in the Sea Cliff ‘reference system’. Those were the days when such approval was, literally, a licence to print money. The fortunate manufacturer just had to wait for the review to appear and the phone to start ringing…
One such product – possibly the last true case in point – was the Audio Research SP11, a two-box tube-hybrid pre-amp that Harry declared was “simply the best.” Dealers and distributors duly fell into line behind the product and the orders duly flowed.
But then something strange occurred…
Remember, these were also the days when pre-amplifiers contained phono-stages. Indeed, it often seemed like the phono-stage was the only real arbiter of pre-amp performance. But, starting in Japan and echoing the rise of CD in the mass market, manufacturers were producing amps that either downgraded the significance of the phono-stage – or discarded it altogether! In a weird historical juxtaposition, Pioneer (of all people) decided to flex their considerable creative muscle and score some credibility points with audiophile customers. The result was a modest integrated amplifier – the A400 – an unmistakably mainstream Japanese product that, once you lifted the lid, revealed circuitry and components that incorporated all the latest Japanese audiophile thinking, from circuit layout and chassis materials to components types and even colours. When a company the size of Pioneer makes a serious effort to show what it can do, smaller, specialist manufacturers risk getting flattened in the process. The A400 quickly gained a substantial following as customers discovered that it offered musical qualities and resolution that many of their hair-shirt, featureless black boxes were struggling to match – and did it without costing a fortune. Serious listeners fell in love with the little amp, often using two or even three to run a system. There was only one fly in the ointment: you guessed it – no phono-stage…
It was only a matter of time before somebody produced a standalone phono-stage with a line-level output that you could plug straight into a product like the A400. That somebody was Tom Evans and the product he designed was marketed as the Michell Iso, the long-established UK turntable manufacturer taking a first, tentative step into the world of electronics in 1989. Of course, over the pond, John Curl had already launched the (soon to be legendary) Vendetta Research SCP-2, but that unit cost around $2000, compared to the Iso’s rather more modest £400. The combination of the Iso and A400 soon established a minor legend of its own. But the Iso had more far-reaching consequences than that…
