The Voice That Is! Presents John Marks, Zesto Audio and Bricasti Design
Posted on June 28, 2019 by Marc Phillips in Audiophile Journal // 0 Comments
I went almost thirty years without traveling back to the Philadelphia area where I once lived, but now thanks to Doug White and The Voice That Is! I’ve been there twice this month. Just three weeks ago I covered Doug’s event for Vertere Acoustics, and Colleen and I had a wonderful time meeting analog legend Touraj Moghaddam of Vertere and meeting up with fellow Part-Time Audiophile writer Richard H. Mak so we could learn more about his analog set-up software, AnalogMagik. This time, Doug hosted an outstanding three-part event featuring John Marks, George and Carolyn Counnas of Zesto Audio and Brian Zolner of Bricasti Design.
The room at the Hampton Inn of Plymouth Meeting PA was the same, Doug’s Tidal Audio Contriva speakers were the same as the last The Voice That Is! event, but nearly everything else was different. (Cabling was Dynamic Design.) In fact, the system changed three times during the day so that each presenter could focus on their products and discussions.
First up was John Marks, formerly of John Marks Records and Stereophile and now representing his blog The Tannhauser Gate. John and I were fellow music reviewers at Positive Feedback for quite a while, and he used to review our gear from Unison Research and Opera for Stereophile. We’ve talked many times–on the phone, by email and even Skype–but this was the first time we met in person.
John’s talk was titled “Everything Makes a Difference,” and he brought plenty of CDs and digital files to demonstrate how the littlest things can make a sonic difference in recordings. For instance, he played two CDs where the only difference was the coloring of the labels–the photo detector in the laser assembly is influenced by the amount of black on the label. Other comparisons involved the more obvious differences between aluminum discs and cryogenically-treated gold discs, and in one detailed comparison he demonstrated four different passes of the original analog tape from Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain where the only difference was the power cord used for the analog-to-digital converter. In most cases, the audience was able to clearly pick out those sonic differences.