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As I saw it, the key was not for the stylus to play the record it was for the stylus to play the groove!”įor the stylus to “play the groove,” Riendeau had to find a way to keep the stylus “in the groove.” Anything that might disturb its composure as it travelled down that long and winding road to end-of-side silence-any resonance or vibration or feedback from outside the playback system (or inside it)-was engineered (beautifully) out of the Delphi. Then I asked myself how each of these elements should ideally interact and, more importantly, how each element should be designed to fulfill its necessary technical contribution without becoming part of and adding to the recorded music being reproduced. My goal was to analyze the key elements that impacted sound reproduction for better or worse: the record, the groove, the supporting elements (platter/sub-chassis), the suspension system, etc. “Perhaps because of my university background,” Riendeau told me, when I asked him about the birth of the Delphi, “I did my own ‘philosophical study’ of a number of the analog pretenders-to-the-throne of the time-from Cotter, Linn, Micro-Sieki, Thorens, Win, etc. So, like Gabriel, Riendeau decided to come up with a ’table of his own. The way the story goes Riendeau originally wanted to import high-end turntables, but, like Hans-Peter Gabriel of Analog Audio Systems (later acquired by Da Vinci Audio Labs), he couldn’t find one that met his standards. That first ’table was the brainchild of Canadian Marcel Riendeau-then a philosophy teacher at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec with a deep interest in music and, given the Delphi’s famous good looks, other beautiful things. So, in a way, in reviewing the Mark VI version of the Delphi I’m also finally getting the chance to play with and review that very first Oracle. The Delphi Mk VI may have been spiffed up a bit, but its design is basically the same as it was when the first Oracle was conceived back in 1979. When a company has been around forever and a day, like Oracle has, it invariably means that it started with sound fundamentals-and those fundamentals don’t change from iteration to iteration. Happily, this little slip-up on my part doesn’t matter much. Of course, I’ve heard Oracles and Linns many many times, with many different arms and cartridges, at friends’ homes, at shows, and in stereo stores (back when stereo stores actually sold turntables). I missed out on the two ’tables that more or less divided the audio world between them from the nineteen-seventies into the nineteen-nineties. Given that Oracle Audio Technology has been in business for thirty years it may seem odd that, before this review, I’ve never had one of its turntables in my stereo system.