The Beauty of Sound
My most cherished intangibles—love, beauty, glimpses of higher realms—enter my awareness only after I prepare my psyche to receive them. Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination. In like manner, collecting LPs and storing them properly, setting up turntables, aligning cartridges, and cleaning styli are ritual actions that prepare me for the high moments of focused musical pleasure only a black disc can provide.
The black-disc high moments I am about to describe were inspired by my turntable guru and setter-upper friend Michael Trei. In one of our regular late-night phone conversations, he mentioned the made-in-Poland J.Sikora turntables. He said he’d set up a few and noticed some kind of intangible something he thought I might appreciate and be able to describe to my readers.
When I scouted the J.Sikora website, I was attracted to the elemental beauty of designer Janusz Sikora’s lowest-priced model, the Initial. The more expensive two-motor Standard and the four-motor (!) Reference models feature thicker, wider composite bases, thicker composite platters, taller composite motor and tonearm towers, and, to my artist/sculptor eyes, a cluttered, disorienting appearance that seems to be de rigueur in today’s oligarch-priced turntables.
A ball hit the oak floor with a loud clack, bounced high, then ran off to nowhere like a scared mouse.
The bare-bones Initial costs $8995 with either a blank arm mount or a mount predrilled for Kuzma, Jelco, Ortofon, Origin Live, or SME tonearms. The Initial package I chose costs $9995 and includes J.Sikora’s High Quality Power Supply and a 10.5" Jelco TK-850M tonearm. No cartridge. I chose the Jelco arm because it kept the price down and would make
