Brinkmann Audio Bardo Turntable

has posted a review of the Brinkmann Audio Bardo turntable ($8000) at The Audio Beat. His conclusions:

The Bardo came across as a fast and muscular record-playing engine. There was a sense of propulsion and accuracy. Perhaps some of this comes from the Brinkmann’s Teutonic character, but I suspect that direct drive grips the road and holds to the curves more precisely. The Bardo evoked the intensity and drive of an Arturo Toscanini, where a belt-drive 'table brings to mind the more relaxed feel of Janos Starker playing cello sonatas…

While the differences between two turntables were not as stark as entire system changes, the Bardo did reflect a different flavor from belt drive. Sinatra’s voice sounded a bit more relaxed and more resonant with the VPI, while the Bardo made Frank sound a bit more driven and the backing orchestra a bit tighter. On a similarly simple assembly of instruments and voice, Louis Armstrong’s "St. James Infirmary" on Satchmo Plays King Oliver [Audio Fidelity AFSD 5930], the VPI setup seemed to slow down the pace of the music and string out the magic of this tune a bit more than the direct-drive 'table, which took a more headlong approach. The Bardo dispensed with some harmonic richness and substituted well-toned muscle in its place.

On string music, the Bardo brought greater definition to the strings, capturing each centimeter of the bow’s vertical movement across the strings, as opposed to the sense with the VPI of more directly experiencing the strings’ horizontal vibrations as the bow moved over them. With large-scale orchestral works, the Bardo provided cleaner crescendos and a bit tighter bass, with various sections of the orchestra standing out — and sorted out more distinctly — compared to the VPI’s somewhat larger soundstage and more relaxed order of detail. The Bardo pulled more detail out of a complex mix of sounds — things lost with the more tube-like sound of rubber-driven 'table. The Bardo’s mix of muscle and bass extension played well with rock and pop music too.

The Bardo’s dead-on sense of pitch required a bit of adjustment to preconceived notions of what well-worn music was supposed to sound like. Can some of the size of the soundstage be a function of uncertain pitch? What of the greater sense of harmonics and the three-dimensional quality associated with the best belt-driven 'tables? Whether or not one course is more right than the other, there is no escaping the fact that the Bardo direct-drive route served up a very quiet background against which a tight and detailed yet non-fatiguing picture emerged.

You can read the full review here.