Playability
"Playability" is an idea I'd like to introduce to you, and it is my measure of how well a component can play any album that you might care to listen to, low-fidelity to high-fidelity, and turn them into the convincing and involving musical performances that I think the musicians and recording engineers would have desired them to be.
Some of the audio kit I've written about over the years were able to play back high-fidelity recordings quite well, but really stumbled when it came to playing lower-fidelity recordings in a musically satisfying way.
My guess is those components were voiced during their design phase using cherry-picked high-fidelity recordings in a "comparison by reference" approach, so they sounded good on those recordings, but then crashed and burned into unpleasantness when playing lower-fidelity recordings that didn't fall into their sweet spot for voicing.
The M3 does very well on playability, and M6 does extremely well on playability, and in fact I've never heard any phono stage that is the equal of the M6 in regards to playability.
I attribute that playability prowess to Audio Note (UK)'s "comparison by contrast" method of voicing used during their R&D process, which seems to deliver the best possible version of recordings from any album I wanted to play.
Recordings I've never heard before all sounded musically engaging and involving. Even with music I didn't particularly care for, the M6 actually gave me insights into why other listeners might enjoy that album.
For me, one of the most valuable performance attributes of the M6 was how it elevated average-fidelity recordings to a sonic level that I've previously only associated with the best remasters of audiophile favorites, say from the likes of Analogue Productions, who are masters at the art of natural sounding high-fidelity recordings.
I've never heard any phono preamplifier come close to what the M6 can do in terms of playability. It is a remarkable performance achievement, and it revealed that many of my average-fidelity albums - too many to mention—were a lot better sounding than I had previously thought, it just took listening to them through the M6 for me to realize their innate potential.
Music lovers take note. The M6 dramatically improved the fidelity of those albums in my library that I thought were just average-fidelity albums of good music, to levels of fidelity that I never knew they were capable of.
Oh, and those superb Analogue Productions albums that are remastered for audiophiles—like Rickie Lee Jones' It's Like This (Analogue Productions, APP 51056, 45 RPM, 2008)—were elevated to a level of fidelity through the M6 that was breathtaking.
Audiophiles take note that the tone, dynamics, and visuospatial presence that make albums feel like live music is occurring in your room, were enhanced impressively by the M6.
It was the "Summer of Love" in 1967. Hippies ruled. Arlo Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's son)—America's favorite hippie at the time—released his folk-rock album, Alice's Restaurant (Reprise Records, RS 6267, 1967).
My copy is old and ratty, all scratched-up, with un-cleanable fine grit embedded deep into its grooves. It makes for a noisy album to listen to that was rather low-fidelity to begin with.
Mine is one of those albums that is normally too painful to listen to on most audio systems. A torture test.
Alice's Restaurant was a bit painful to listen to on the M3, but bearable. On the M6 it was reasonably pleasant to listen to, but certainly wouldn't be mistaken for a well cared for high-fidelity album.
Even the M6 couldn't heal that much damage from years of neglect. In spite of that noisiness, and the lower-fidelity nature of recording, to my surprise the M6 still allowed Arlo's music to come through as interesting and emotionally engaging in a 1960s sort of way.
The moral is that even low-fidelity recordings are not a barrier to musical enjoyment with the M6, and it can be surprising how much better low-fidelity recordings can sound when played over high-fidelity audio components like the M6, which vastly expands the breadth of recordings that you can listen to and enjoy from our recorded music canon.
I want to add an observation that is not intuitive at all from a playability standpoint. One might think that a fidelity-reducing homogenization of sound quality in the voicing of a component would yield a greater degree of playability across the span of low to high-fidelity recordings, where the recordings converge to some sort of similar forgiving sound quality average, but that is not the case at all with these Audio Note (UK) phono preamplifiers.
Rather, the M6 (and the M3 to a lesser degree) provided impressive insights into how different albums—and their recording styles—are from each other, and the nature of the musicians' and recording engineers' choices in producing the albums. I believe this to be related to a lot more musical information coming through the M6 to the listener, and it gave me more of an appreciation for how each album is a unique work of the musical and recording arts.
Hearing how distinct each album is in its own right, as an individual musical artwork, I found to be fascinating, as well as intellectually stimulating and satisfying.
Detection Limit and Resolution
How does Audio Note (UK) accomplish this feat of enhanced resolution of recordings while still boosting overall musicality?
First of all, my perception was that there was a remarkable amount of musical information coming through from the recordings with the M3, and particularly the M6, more than is the norm.
I tend to think about this greater amount of musical information coming through in terms of the detection limit and resolution.
Way back during the Jurassic Period, when I was a graduate student working on my doctorate in analytical chemistry, a major focus was on lowering the detection limit of analytical instrumentation.
We wanted to be able to detect chemical compounds in vanishingly smaller amounts in the samples we analyzed. We considered the detection limit to be 3 times the noise in analytical chemistry, and below that the signal was not distinguishable from the noise. So a fair amount of the focus was on mining the depths of what was possible in the signal-to-noise ratio.
When pushing the limit of detection lower and lower, ever smaller signals from smaller amounts of chemical compounds could be detected. Now in many analyses there were multiple signals from different chemical compounds present in the overall signal at the same time.
It is important to be able to distinguish between those individual contributions of low-level signals to the overall signal, to resolve them from each other, so we could tell the difference between them, so we could know the contribution from the signal of each chemical compound to the overall signal.
With the M3, and particularly the M6, I think there is a corollary to the detection limit and resolution concepts of analytical chemistry, but in audio signal terms.
What I hear with the M6, is that the choice of the circuit, and the way the circuit is implemented with upgraded circuit components, results in the M6 recovering more of the low-level signals than is the norm—it has a lower detection limit for low-level signal nuances in the overall audio signal.
Also, for all of those different very low-level signal contributions from various instruments (harmonics, overtones, etc.), and the various low-level visuospatial signals that are present in the overall audio signal, they are detected by the M6 and resolved, so that each of those very low-level signal contributions maintains its unique identity and character.
So what I think is happening here, is that instead of homogenizing the overall signal for increased playability, the M6 is providing lower detection levels and greater resolution, which fills in information gaps in the music signal and contributes to a higher-fidelity playback from basically any quality of recording, which increases the playability across the range of low to high-fidelity recordings as a result.
I believe there is more information in the audio signal than is typically recovered by audio components, and the M6 is detecting and resolving it. The result is that the fidelity and recording style differences between albums becomes more apparent, and the missing information that degrades fidelity is recovered, which contributes to higher-fidelity from any recording you might care to listen to.
Not only do higher-fidelity recordings sound better, but lower-fidelity recordings do too, sometimes remarkably so.
In analog recordings, particularly from earlier periods when recordings were noisier, you can hear music signal information below the level of the noise, particularly in those albums from the acoustic, electric, and monaural magnetic eras of recording, and by resolving that low-level musical information it makes those early recordings more musically satisfying to listen to.
Now that's not to say every low-fidelity recording is going to sound like a high-fidelity recording, as some low-fidelity recordings are just so buggered-up due to the recording technology of a time period, or choices made by the recording engineers who recorded them, or other factors, they will sound like what they are.
However, I do find the M6 is able to make most low-fidelity recordings sound better, sometimes much better, than I am used to hearing from them.
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