Its unfortunate that these forum discussions can sometimes get out of hand when (a) members words get nitpicked or(b) some posters with less than honorable intentions chime in to tear down a genuinely good piece of work because their friend is no longer affiliated with the Simon Yorke Designs, especially when the same poster can be found to say it was amazing elsewhere in the Audiogon forums.
To reiterate what I had posted previously in another way: the Yorkes will sound like what is connected ahead of it and behind it. I think Gearge found this out when he had it is his Goldman system, not to say the Goldman is bad but a system is made of the sum of its parts...or the speakers,room cables,amp combo did not click. We tend to assemble systems than flatter our existing gear for better or for worse...Simon Yorke dealers are well trained and will perform the installation and guide client through any step to get the best sound from their investment.
What the Yorkes do is extracts alot of music off the wax. If one wants to attain a certain sound from it, well simply mate it with the cartridge and electronics "you like". Put on any cartridge and you will easily hear the cartridges "house sound" Lyras are amazingly fast and resolving, Koetsus have a spooky mid range presence, Air tight's PC1 is rich,full bodied and nimble, just to name a few.
Simon did not set out to make his players to "sound a certain way".I will not even use the world neutral as it has taken on a life of its own... A couple of things I found when playing records on his players is that I find myself less concerned with the usual audiophile trappings like listening for the width and depth of the soundstage or how loud is the scuffle of sheet music as musicians turn the page during a performance, but find myself hearing the interactions of the musicians or the way a player leans into a note of backs off it.
Another observation is, I started listening to music that used to fly over my head and some records that I had for years that I wanted to understand more about but could not listen through a whole track with out being distracted until I heard it on the Yorkes. One such record is Cecil Taylor's "Unit Structures" lp on Blue Note records. Admittedly free jazz is not my favorite type of jazz, personal favorites include soul jazz, hard bop almost anything jazz recorded before 1968 and some contemporary jazz.. . When I dropped the needle on this record, what I came to realized was: the record was full of energy and motion, darting ideas and sporadic burst of tonal color floating on an elliptical sense of time constructed within a looser framework than just simply playing on 2 and 4 beats of more traditional time signature but the band was using all time signatures briefly as they needed and moved on. Perhaps this was "beauty" of this record... I ended up Listening to the whole side of the record...
Most music lovers,audiophiles are bright folks,though my wife does question my mental capacity more than one a week :-) regularly, I don't think you can fool anybody into buying anything if they are not moved to do so.
