I am new to this forum and am not in the habit of posting my impressions of audio equipment on-line. But I felt that I needed to say something about the new Supatrac Nighthawk tonearm, which was just installed in my system and during my very first, abbreviated listening session produced sound of extraordinary realism and beauty. This arm’s unique design employs a patented sideways unipivot.
I learned of Supatrac from a glowing review that Michael Fremer did of the Supatrac Blackbird tonearm in Tracking Angle. I ordered the Blackbird arm, but then upgraded my order to the newer, more rigid version of the arm (the Nighthawk) after it it had been introduced in beta form at the Munich High-End show this year and got similar accolades from multiple reviewers. I understand that construction of the carbon fiber arm tubes, the pillar, and both the front end of the arm (where the cartridge attaches to the arm) and the back end of the arm (where it pivots) have been made substantially more rigid. I also understand from the arm’s designer (Richard Braine) that I am one of the very first “early adopters” of the Nighthawk.
This post will be brief and very preliminary because I had only one short listening session with the Nighthawk before I needed to go out of town for an extended period. In a nutshell, what I heard after listening to a few sides of a few jazz and classical albums that I have played numerous times over the years and know extremely well was sublime.
Here are some discrete impressions I had of the Nighthawk tonearm:
>Sense of depth and breadth of performing space. The tonearm vividly revealed the contours of the listening space itself - its width, depth, and reverberant qualities. To the extent this ambient information was on the LP, the arm extracted it.
>Piano (specifically Bill Evans’ piano on “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”) had a real life palpability far beyond anything I’d ever heard before when playing this album. This is an extraordinarily well-recorded album, and the Craft Recordings reissue I have is exceptional. But I do not recall having the same sense of the “weight” of each piano key when played on this album that I did through the Nighthawk arm. The keys when played had a “presence” in the same way that the keys played on a live piano do. I was not simply hearing tones or “plinks” as the keys were played, but rather the Nighthawk tonearm conveyed the mass of each felt-covered hammer hitting the strings.
>Janos Starker’s cello (on the Speakers Corner reissue of the Mercury box set of Bach solo cello suites) has never sounded so deep and resonant before. His cello had a fullness and richness that was stunning. This to me speaks volumes about the tonal accuracy of the Nighthawk arm. And I heard Starker’s breathing clearly as he bowed - information I do not recall being extracted before as recognizably from the grooves.
>Bass notes were deep and distinct, not wooly; cymbal strikes were sharp and clearly defined and decays naturally extended.
>Clarity. Even in complex, dynamic, multi-instrument passages, the various instruments never lost their individual character or location in space, never became part of an undifferentiated, blurred mass of sound. In other words, the Nighthawk arm reproduced what was recorded with precision and clarity, but without etching.
I likely will supplement these impressions after I have done more extensive listening this fall. But apart from any specific impressions that I can articulate, the bottom line is that the Nighthawk arm (with its sideways unipivot design) conveyed the music I played in a palpably real and stunningly beautiful way.
I learned of Supatrac from a glowing review that Michael Fremer did of the Supatrac Blackbird tonearm in Tracking Angle. I ordered the Blackbird arm, but then upgraded my order to the newer, more rigid version of the arm (the Nighthawk) after it it had been introduced in beta form at the Munich High-End show this year and got similar accolades from multiple reviewers. I understand that construction of the carbon fiber arm tubes, the pillar, and both the front end of the arm (where the cartridge attaches to the arm) and the back end of the arm (where it pivots) have been made substantially more rigid. I also understand from the arm’s designer (Richard Braine) that I am one of the very first “early adopters” of the Nighthawk.
This post will be brief and very preliminary because I had only one short listening session with the Nighthawk before I needed to go out of town for an extended period. In a nutshell, what I heard after listening to a few sides of a few jazz and classical albums that I have played numerous times over the years and know extremely well was sublime.
Here are some discrete impressions I had of the Nighthawk tonearm:
>Sense of depth and breadth of performing space. The tonearm vividly revealed the contours of the listening space itself - its width, depth, and reverberant qualities. To the extent this ambient information was on the LP, the arm extracted it.
>Piano (specifically Bill Evans’ piano on “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”) had a real life palpability far beyond anything I’d ever heard before when playing this album. This is an extraordinarily well-recorded album, and the Craft Recordings reissue I have is exceptional. But I do not recall having the same sense of the “weight” of each piano key when played on this album that I did through the Nighthawk arm. The keys when played had a “presence” in the same way that the keys played on a live piano do. I was not simply hearing tones or “plinks” as the keys were played, but rather the Nighthawk tonearm conveyed the mass of each felt-covered hammer hitting the strings.
>Janos Starker’s cello (on the Speakers Corner reissue of the Mercury box set of Bach solo cello suites) has never sounded so deep and resonant before. His cello had a fullness and richness that was stunning. This to me speaks volumes about the tonal accuracy of the Nighthawk arm. And I heard Starker’s breathing clearly as he bowed - information I do not recall being extracted before as recognizably from the grooves.
>Bass notes were deep and distinct, not wooly; cymbal strikes were sharp and clearly defined and decays naturally extended.
>Clarity. Even in complex, dynamic, multi-instrument passages, the various instruments never lost their individual character or location in space, never became part of an undifferentiated, blurred mass of sound. In other words, the Nighthawk arm reproduced what was recorded with precision and clarity, but without etching.
I likely will supplement these impressions after I have done more extensive listening this fall. But apart from any specific impressions that I can articulate, the bottom line is that the Nighthawk arm (with its sideways unipivot design) conveyed the music I played in a palpably real and stunningly beautiful way.
