Sutherland Engineering KC VIBE MK2 Phonostage
A couple of years ago I drove to Angie Lisi’s American Sound of Canada store in northern Toronto to have my Pro-ject Red cartridge replaced with the Shelter Model 501 III MC. The publisher of Audiophilia and close friend, Anthony Kershaw, was kind enough to lend me the Shelter so I could transform my vinyl listening experience from banal to memorable.
Whilst at Angie’s she played some vinyl through the KC Vibe Mk 2 ($900) and then went through the gain functions inside the unit; the sound and presence of the recording so blew me away that I was left with no option but to purchase it. Now, having had Ron Sutherland’s KC Vibe for some time, relishing the renaissance of vinyl through the use of a first-class cartridge and a first-class phono preamp, I feel compelled to sing its praises to our audience.
Before we jump into the impressive details of the KC Vibe, let’s review some analog principles for the reading audience. I am not a trained audio engineer, so with any review one owes it to the manufacturer to understand the electronic possibilities and restrictions they face to bring their products to market. And by the way, the more I learn about the Hi-Fi world the more impressed I am with the dogged experimentation and tenacity that goes into their products and Ron Sutherland’s KC Vibe is no exception. First a brief review then details.
If you were to explain to a beginning audiophile what a phono-amp was, your explanation might be pretty straightforward: it’s a device that takes your turntable’s low-level output and converts it into a line-level output for your amplifier. This is because the cartridge on your turntable uses such low voltage that a phono stage or phono preamp is necessary to boost the signal from your cartridge for you to realize an audio presence. The phono stage will use gain and EQ to the output of your phono cartridge to produce this presence, then will send that amplified signal with EQ—called the RIAA curve—to the phono amp and from your phono-amp, with that new informed signal to your amplifier, and from there, the signal reaches your speakers. Voila, we have sound. Except, we all know there is a hell of a lot more detail that goes on internally.
If you have ever plugged your turntable into a line-level output to your amplifier and turned up the volume, you will notice a very thin sound emerging from your system. The reason for this comes back to the vinyl-making process itself. Any lower register sounds require a wider groove or width on the LP and this requires far more surface area than is physically possible. The LP is already handling a massive amount of musical information so some accommodation is required. By de-emphasizing the bass and augmenting the midrange and high register sounds, the width of the grooves in the manufacturing process is reduced, allowing more grooves and more information on the vinyl. Wonderful solution, but another accommodation is required. When you drop your needle, your phono amp does the opposite to balance the de-emphasized bass accommodation made in the manufacturing process. It boosts the bass and cuts the treble. So what you hear through your system should, in theory, be what the recording engineer hears. Well, that’s the theory. How does your phono stage pull this backflip off? Gain, or amplification and EQ—equalization, better known in the industry as the RIAA curve, or the Recording Association of America’s equalization, standardized in the mid-1950s.
This is the standard by which the anemic bass and over EQ’d treble from the vinyl are changed back to a more accurate heightened bass and balanced treble. In all of life, every accommodation, so-called improvement, or breakthrough must, however, create an effect on something else. By boosting the bass from the LP, the phono amp will also augment the mechanical sound of your turntable. This is why turntable manufacturers have spent so much time over the past decades chasing the goal of the perfectly quiet, balanced turntable. And by and large, they have been wildly successful. So if that’s the simple overview of vinyl sound production, let’s now look at the specifics of Ron’s KC Vibe phono stage.
Weighing in at 6 lbs., measuring 11 inches wide, 9 inches deep and 2 inches high, the small KC Vibe has a utilitarian beauty that breathes efficiency, craftsmanship and artful design. The chassis is folded steel sheets with a brushed powder silver bottom that looks like aluminum, all neatly bolted together and smelling of quality. The power source is a massive 48-volt power supply—more on that later—feeding a single circuit board with a tight direct construction employing 3300 microfarad Cornell-Dubilier capacitors, Nichion capacitors, Zener diodes, Dale/Vishay metal film resistors, and gold plated shunts wrapped in a dual mono design. There is no on/off switch—the KC Vibe is perpetually “turned on.” The absence of dip switches simply underlines the Vibe’s pugnacious credo: In quality we trust. Yes, to adjust your desired gain and load settings you must unscrew the lid of the Vibe and lift. Revealed in beautiful simplicity are the gold-plated shunts and clear markings for you to adjust to the well-known levels offered in most phono amps. Gain is marked as 40, 45, 50, 55 and 60 dB; the load is marked as 100, 200, 475, 1K and 47K. The circuit board is a work of organizational beauty.
My low out put MC Shelter was set to 60 dB of gain and 100 ohms.
Asked in an interview whether he works with a standard of cartridge in mind and then engineers a phono-amp backwards, Mr. Sutherland’s response was revealing: “I don’t think that way. I do good engineering; I want to be technically correct, and technically optimized; I use first-class materials…., using op-amps for their precision, repeatability, reliability and their availability. I use 25-dollar op-amps…you can find 25-cent op-amps out there”.
“I do good engineering” sounds like any manufacturer’s axiomatic advertising statement.
But, if we look just for the moment at the KC Vibe’s power supply source—a full and robust 48-volt power supply for a phono-amp—we can start to see what Ron Sutherland means. His massive 48-volt power supply sits external to the phono stage, diminishing electronic interference to the workings of the amp. The external power supply is so robust, that it offers a massive reservoir of amp power and filtration power. If audio engineering is the quest for the holy grail, the ideal and maximum removal of electronic noise so that the original sound source, in this case, high-quality vinyl, is reproduced at its optimal level of original clarity, then the KC Vibe is as close as anything to the grail. In our “electronic fallen world” lowering the noise floor is Ron Sutherland’s first principle, it is his modus operandi! 48 volts reduces electronic colouration and distortion substantially, allowing a line of large resistant capacitors to deliver clean, noiseless power to the gain stage. 30 volts to drive the amp and 18 to apply to electromagnetic noise. Think of some of the products that have a 12, 18, or 24-volt power source; it is difficult to imagine this level of power driving the amp and having enough power to filter the “electronic noise” successfully.
Sutherland is very fond of using the water analogy, as does many an engineer, but it is most apropos for explaining his power source. Any stream of clean water or electricity to flow through a filtration system needs a significantly powerful source. But once driven through the filters, the water is exquisitely clean. So, too, with electricity. From the 48 volt source, electricity flows through four 3300 microfarad Cornell Dubilier capacitors, filtering electromagnetic noise, if you like, rendering the electricity “clean.” This eats up a large amount of voltage, but, like your vigorous source of water, you have started with, not 18 or 24 volts, but with 48 volts. You use 30 volts to filter, you have 18 volts to drive your amp. This is what I heard at Angie’s store and this is what I rehear every time I play my vinyl through the KC Vibe at home; if you can tame the age-old problem of electronic colouration and distortion you can create an exacting reproduction of your well-recorded vinyl with a clean, heavily detailed and luminescent sound that I call “presence”. It is as if the vinyl fills the room. It is not stuck in the speakers—it leaps out at you. This is the beauty of the KC Vibe: stunning presence.
Sound
I have Fritz Reiner’s 1958 mono performance of Verdi’s Requiem on vinyl in the RCA Soria series with the Vienna Philharmonic, Jussi Bjoerling (tenor), Leontyne Price (soprano), Rosalind Elias (alto), and Giorgio Tozzi (bass). Was ever a vocal cast created to match this one? It is, however, one of the longest performances of the Requiem recorded in any format. The opening is painfully slow, and musically, I am not convinced by Reiner’s tempo of this section. In fact, I am not convinced by the choral work and I would have preferred to have had the Chicago orchestra as the engine of the performance; but still, it is a performance of significant merit. Except for the “Requiem aeternam” which is at a tempo of 58 beats per minute—Verdi’s marking is 88 beats per minute—none of the other parts of the Requiem sound that slow. Of course, when the “Requiem aeternam” returns near the end of the mass just before the stunning “Libera me”, Reiner returns to his lethargic tempo of the opening and demands, oh so cruelly, the soprano sing unaccompanied, maintaining intonation and control at a ridiculously slow tempo. Leontyne Price’s performance is unmatched in this section under exceptionally difficult conditions. What a soprano! However, I want to point out Bjoerling’s entrance during the “Kyrie Eleison”. The vitality of the man’s voice and the presence created through the Vibe is soul uplifting. Verdi wrote the greatest Requiem music in the history of Western civilization, giving a level of drama and operatic quality to the mass that has not been matched, and remember I am a serious fan of Berlioz and Fauré. But even though the limitations of mono, the KC Vibe throws Jussi Bjoerling’s stunning voice out into the universe with the clarity of an angelic force that is extraordinary. This is where the physical material world meets the presence and clarity of spirit with the KC Vibe facilitating this synchronicity.
Returning from the spirit, a final observation on Ron’s engineering. When you pop the top of the KC Vibe you see a circuit board of elegance and simplicity. You see the thin metal Dale/Vishay resistors, no carbon resistors here. You see Nichion capacitors. Remember Ron’s analogy of the levels of water flow with filtration, well, at the last ‘reservoir’ he installs a spillway. Any excess voltage is converted by the Zener diodes into heat, but throughout the circuit board, there is a constant current. Two-thirds of the board is clean power, the rest of the board is a tightly packed simple circuit with the Input jack going right to the loading resistors—the gain resistors are fitted tightly right beside the load. The visual order is driven by function. I’m going to repeat this: the visual order is driven by function.
Yes, Mr. Sutherland, you “…do good engineering.” As I put on the piano titan Nelson Freire’s performance of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor on the Columbia Masterworks label, the piece that Brahms fell asleep to, the piece Wagner called “…great, gracious, profound, noble, sublime like yourself,” I want to express my gratitude for your “… good engineering.” The technical and dynamic power of Liszt’s greatest creation, the massive fluctuations in fortes and triple pianissimos, are all clearly brought to light, and every detail in Freire’s superb playing is excavated with magnificent clarity through your KC Vibe MK2.
Conclusion
This $900 phono preamp has granted me a most envied entrance into the vinyl universe and it bears repeating your no-nonsense approach to audio engineering has justifiably garnered praise and admiration and we can see in the modestly priced KC Vibe MK2 some of the wisest and smartest audio engineering on the market. But more than this, you have synchronized the physical world of vinyl with the spirit of music, and for that, I will be always grateful.
Further information: Sutherland Engineering
