What $45,000 sounds like

What you don’t know, you don’t miss. That is, until someone points out what you’re missing. Then, suddenly, what you had before is no longer adequate. This holds true, I suspect, for many raised in the digital age, which sees music files compressed to the point where information is sacrificed for convenience. The tunes sound fine until you experience a piece of music played on a solid brass top-of-theline record player.

Meet the Kuzma XL2, a Slovenian-made turntable designed and crafted by a master machinist.

“As soon as you put the needle on, the sound blows your mind. It’s so huge, so experiential. It’s as if you are in the same room as the musicians,” says Kathy Frankiewicz, manager of Planet of Sound in Old Ottawa South.

Did I mention that the Kuzma is most often paired with a 10,000-needle cartridge and a 4-point Kuzma control arm? And high-end amp and speakers, of course. Obviously, this piece of technical perfection is out of reach for most.

But consider this: a “mechanical tour de force,” as Frankiewicz affectionately calls it, the Kuzma is also an aesthetic marvel — a piece of functional art, the centrepiece in any room. And if you’d pay tens of thousands for an artwork, why not one that puts you in the same room as Pink Floyd?

$45,000. Planet of Sound. 1194 Bank St.