MARK LEVINSON No. 5101 & No. 5805
Mark Levinson (the man) is widely credited as being the founder of the highend audio business. He was a talented multi-instrumentalist who, immediately prior to starting-up his eponymously named company, was the bassist for the famous Canadian jazz pianist Paul Bley. Levinson decided to build audio equipment in his spare time because, in his own words, “I heard that the sound we played as musicians did not sound like what came out of speakers, and decided to narrow the gap. That led to decades of involvement in audio recording and equipment design and manufacturing.”
You certainly could not doubt Levinson’s credentials for entering the audio business, because his great uncle was none other than Heinrich Hertz, the physicist who first demonstrated the electro-magnetic wave!
Levinson’s first commercial product was a preamplifier called the LNP-2, so-named because it was a “Low Noise Preamplifier”. It was designed by Richard (Dick) Burwen, an electronics genius who designed and built a magnetometer that successfully measured the magnetic field of the moon from orbit, designed integrated circuits for Analog Devices and National Semiconductor, and designed specialist electronic equipment and circuitry used in industrial control, medical and electrical testing applications.
Levinson’s later products were designed by Paul Jayson and the late Tom Colangelo, the two of whom also helped Levinson found his second audio company, Cello, before they left him to found their own company (Viola Audio Laboratories) and he went on to sell Cello and found Red Rose Music.
As you’ve probably guessed from the previous paragraph, Mark Levinson no longer owns the company that bears his name, it’s owned by Harman International, which also owns AKG, Arcam, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon, Martin, Revel, and Studer, but the company has continued the ‘Mark Levinson tradition’ of building products whose sound is close to that ‘heard by musicians’.
NO. 5805 INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER/DAC
The sleekly austere appearance of the No. 5805’s front panel rather belies the myriad control and operational functions that can be achieved by manipulating that panel’s rotary encoder at right in combination with the panel’s central 32-character alphanumeric display.
Primarily, of course, this encoder functions as a volume control, though when acting in this mode it actually controls banks of precision resistors, rather than an integrated circuit. And when it is functioning as a volume control, it is unlike any volume control we have ever used before, because you can adjust the way that it works by choosing from three different operating modes that Levinson calls ‘tapers’.
In Mode 1 rotating the knob quickly will cause
