I was hoping to hear the actual answer to the original poster’s question: has anyone heard the Stein Perfect Interface but so far, not one person has been able to actually answer the one - and ONLY - question they were asked to comment on. (We do that a lot these days don’t we? Even I do sometimes. We answer everything except the question we were asked). It’s a bit like having a woman ask you directly: "Do you love me or not?" And we start talking about how great a cook she is, or what a great guy she is (SMACK! SMACK!) or how there’s nobody like her. We just can’t answer the ONE, simple, direct question put to us.
I can help with that.
I bought a Stein Perfect Interface mat. I bought the $349 mat (the $250 mat is for CDs, not lps). Not that I doubted Jonathan (TAS), but I just didn’t want to expect the moon and just be given a satellite orbiting the earth instead. Onwards, then..
When I put the mat on the lowly Rega Planar 3, and played my first record, I was beyond disappointed. But then, I had purposely picked an old disco record from my days a dj. I knew it was crap, having played it 3 days befor the Stein arrived, just after discovering it again on the shelf with 4,000 other records (no longer alphabetically arranged, I’m sad to say!) I couldn’t tell much difference between the Stein and the mat I had just removed. I literally played one song, and then got up and walked out of the room. I knew it would eventually sound better, but I was hoping it would work on a highly mediocre - if not poor- disco record. I wasn’t expecting miracles, but neither was I expecting... absolutely nothing at all. At least, nothing I could point to as "Wow, that doesn’t sound half bad!" I got. NOTHING. Nada. Zilch. And that WAS disappointing. So I went outside and chopped down an invasive bush in the back yard (all thorns, kinda like I was feeling inside).
Hours later, I decided it was time and I went back into the music room and put on the 200 gram, Classic Records release of Faustus, the ballet. I’d had it for years, listened to it....once. And not even all the way through.
It started up. I held my breath. WHOA, NELLIE! This was a completely different ball of wax. By the way, I used it on an original Rega Planar 3, like, totally dude, one made in the Dark Ages of 1988. Faustus sprang to life in a way I would not have expected.
I must confess, I tried to sabotage hearing the effect by using my NAD C356BEE integrated, which, while good, tends to not separate out musical lines that well. The Stein came on like Superman: "I’LL SAVE YOU!"
Suddenly, you can hear most of the acoustic of the London Symphony Orchestra in a way that doesn’t sound like the orchestral sections "beamed-me-up-Scotty" into the room when their section way playing. It sounded like EVERYBODY’S section was playing, the limitations of the NAD and the Rega, notwithstanding. The sound developed a heretofore "liquid" sound (NOT a trait of the Rega OR the NAD) and the presentation overall was quite persuasive. Flutes sounded "rounder" (aka, more three-dimensional), along with the rest of the orchestra.
I could wax poetic, but I don’t see the point. This isn’t merely a mat, it’s something that causes you to be enveloped inside the music, not just "watching" it and hearing it. If it were an amplifier, I’d say I went from an NAD to a VAC Renaissance 70/670 (which I’ve owned), or from a Rega top perhaps a Goldmund Studio/T3F turntable setup. So, my attempts at sabotage (I like to play AGAINST the odd sometimes in my experimentation with audio, leftover from my days as a reviewer), I failed. Completely.
However, UNLIKE Jonathan Valin, this did NOT do it to "each and every lp" I played. BUT, I’ve only played 4 so far. The Stein arrived very recently and there were other matters that were urgent and demanded immediate attention.
So, I’ll play other records, and note which ones (poor record quality, mediocre record quality, or good record quality) showed the most improvement. Frankly, I want to hear how Maria Callas sounds. And then I’ll move the turntable setup to my Nottingham, just for comparison, but that’s weeks away.
Suffice it to say, after perhaps 10-15 mats, nothing else was even in the same galaxy. I think there’s pixie dust in them thar pieces of trees that make up that mat, because it is most assuredly magical, and it won’t take long to hear it, unless you play only modern pop music - and who knows, even that might sound better. But my guess is, it will take recordings of acoustic instruments to show the Stein’s greatest glories, so I’m not sure Kraftwerk will do the trick (but i’m sure gonna find out in the next few days, now that I’ve got 3 days to listen without dreary work intruding)!
I like this better than when I got a Hana ML, the Audio Research Vsi60, the Nordost Tyr 2 interconnects, the Shunyata Anaconda speaker cable (or even the Shunayta Sigma NR I bought years ago). They were all great and made music wonderful to listen to. What they didn’t do was surprise me to the degree the Stein did. I expected each and every one of THOSE components to sound as good as they did, because I’d had enough experience in the upper reaches of audio Boy-Toy Land over the past 40 years. The only other component that did what the Stein did to a greater degree was my ASL Hurricanes, which, the first time I heard them, made me whip around ( was heading to the listening chair), utterly unnerved by how utterly "real" the music sounded. Which means better than my Jadis amps, Goldmund amps, WATTS, any cartridge you care to name, and almost any speaker system I’ve heard for the first time (except the Manger speakers I got for review, back in 2005, which were as spooky as the Hurricanes. Too bad the Mangers arrived with one speaker smashed by UPS, so I got to hear it for a few hours. Than I moved them to another room, and whatever was already wrong got worse and I never heard the Hurricanes and the Mangers together. Not hyperbole, either. You just expect a proportionate response based on how much money you spent. The Stein sounded like my system had just had a $10,000 component dropped into it. (And with vastly less setup effort, which as most of us know, is part of what is required for the results: blood, sweat and tears (and wishing and hoping) to get that big thrill. This was much too simple. It just shouldn’t have been THAT good for absolutely NO effort (aside from the expenditure itself). Where was the pain, the suffering, the agonizing? It just shouldn’ta been that good. Not with just a Rega and an NAD. Disproportionate Joy.
For its price, and for what it does, the Stein is stunning. Mostly because you won’t expect - or believe - what comes out of your speakers. I’m sure there are more dazzling components around, but then, you’ll have spent 10k to 50k on them. For 350 smackers, the Stein’s unbeatable in my book.
