Patrick James

Today I sent my Michell GyroDec off to its new owner in Spain. I’ve sold it on eBay because I’m converting my dedicated music room into a study with music, and that means a smaller hi fi is required. Also I haven’t played any LPs for a long time.

I’ve had that GyroDec for twenty years and it works as well at the end of that time as it did at the beginning. The sound quality from it is really awesome. The only alteration to it was that I had the arm board fitted with a height adjuster for the Rega tonearms.

I remember when I bought it I paid a little bit more for the black and gold version and I’m glad I did because I always preferred it to the aluminium and gold ones.

I think that the designer John Michell really got it right with the GyroDec. It does have a lineage back to David Gammon’s Transcriptor Hydraulic Reference, but it is a far better turntable.

The GyroDec has a suspended chassis and uniquely this is designed so that the centre of gravity is at the platter bearing. Different arms can be accommodated and the balance is maintained as the arm board for each arm weighted such that the arm and arm board combined weight is always 1 kg.

When the GyroDec first appeared it had an aluminium platter and a thick mat. Mine was the second version with an acrylic platter with no mat. The GyroDec is one of the few turntables I know of which has a pretty high mass suspended sub-chassis. Certainly when it was introduced turnables either had a fairly light suspended sub-chassis or they had no sub-chassis but heavy-ish plinths.

About a year or so after I bought the GyroDec I got the GyroPower for it which was a passive mains regulator. This improved the sound to an extent which really surprised me. However the best sound improvement for the GyroDec was simply to put it on a light hi-fi equipment stand, with no other stuff on the stand. I used a sound organisation shelf when I lived in London and a Hi-Fi News/Record Review WallNut II shelf in Hove where I now live. With a light dedicated stand the GyroDec sound really comes to life, the music sounds like it has been set free from record player.

For a long time I used a Rega RB250, then I had this arm greatly modified by Origin Live with new cable and counterweight. The improvements were good but not as great as simply putting the GyroDec on its own stand.

On Friday I picked up a CD Player, Headphone amp and power amp which I’d bought on eBay.

These are all from the Sugden Bijou range which was made for a few years in the 00s.

The eventual plan is that they will be in the new study I’m creating out of my old music room. However as that new study is currently work in progress the Sugden Bijou system is in my living room.

I am listening to it with my Sennheiser Reference Gold headphones and my Rogers db101 speakers.

The old system that used to dominate my music room is being sold on eBay at present.

I’m going through that big hi fi thing where you buy new stuff and then you want to listen to every CD/LP whatever through it that you own just to see what they sound like. Care has to be taken not to let this take over all your existence!

My initial impressions are really good. I’m listening mostly using my Sennheiser Reference Gold headphones because of my conversion to headphones over the last year or so. The temporary arrangement in my living room isn’t a great one for the Rogers db101s as they are quite far out from the back wall and they really need to be near it to reinforce their bass output.

The centrepiece of the Sugden Bijou system is the HeadMaster headphone amplifier which doubles up as a pre-amp for the Sugden AmpMaster.

As a headphone amplifier the HeadMaster really is truly superb. I did a lot of searching on the web about the Bijou stuff before my purchase at eBay. There were lots of conflicting reports about it.

I’m finding the amount of energy in the treble is quite new. My old Audio Innovations valve amplifier, now sold, did have very fluid and easy sounding treble, as of course valve amps do, but compared with the Sugden Bijou HeadMaster it in retrospect might have been a bit overly light in touch. I have a CD which includes Renée Fleming singing Straus’s popular Four Last Songs. The orchestra is the Houston Symphony and the conductor is Christoph Eschenbach. Renée Fleming’s singing on the CD is really stunning and the Sugden HeadMaster and CDMaster really show her singing in all its beauty. She has a combination of great finesse with controlled power, and the Sugden stuff is just so good with this kind of material. With the Audio Innovations amplifier I would hear the finesse, but too warm around its edges to really hear her nuancing, and not showing the power in her voice either.

Before I bought the Sugden Bijou stuff I did a lot of searching on the ‘net for info. The item of greatest interest was the HeadMaster and I read lots of comments and bits of reviews over the years. It is amazing how varied the impressions are.

The weirdest is someone in a forum saying that the HeadMaster had some deficiency which meant that it couldn’t play music with electric guitars properly. I do have lots of CDs with electric guitars which, in truth, I hardly ever listen to any more. I got one out, Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop CD, and I was very pleased to hear Jeff Beck’s guitar playing in its full glory.

People want to summarise the sound of the HeadMaster as being either “warm” or “cold”. Both temperatures are put forward as descriptions. I guess it shows how difficult it is to describe sound with words. My old Audio Innovations 500 amplifier was definitely warm but you can’t say that about the HeadMaster or the AmpMaster. I think the sound is quite vivid compared to what I’m used to, I saw someone describe it as “velvety” and I just might be tempted to say that it is a tiny bit velvety but really, most of all it is very neutral.

For a while now I’ve been using a really simple system for listening to music and I have to say that it is probably the best quality/listening experience at home I’ve ever had!

I’m selling most of my hi-fi at the moment at eBay, it is boxed up in the living room. In my “music room” now is just my Meridian 206B CD player, my Sennheiser HD540 Reference Gold headphones and a headphone amplifier, I bought about six months ago, which is a Pro-Ject Headbox II. The Sennheiser headphones and Meridian CD player I’ve owned for nearly 20 years.

The new part, the Pro-Ject headphone amplifier is, I think just coming to the end of its “running in” period and beginning to really sound good.

I’ve decided that I really like listening to music on headphones. The quality is superb and the idiosyncrasies of headphone listening don’t annoy me at all. The main idiosyncrasy is the weird sound staging, which is sort of in your head, however I’ve become accustomed to this and in fact I rather like it.