The beginning of the End: the Shindo Vosne-Romanee

How the Shindo VR showed me the light at the end of the audiofool tunnel.

Sometime last month, July 2023, my audiophile quest abruptly ended. The sound I always visualised in my head was — to my greatest surprise — emanating out of my speakers. CD after CD, engaged me like never before. This was it, a sudden, shocking, surprising end of what seemed like a frustrating, never-ending audiophile ”quest”.

The late and great Art Dudley of Stereophile magazine once said: There are two kinds of good sound: Good sound sound and good music sound. 

Certainly, I was getting good sound sound from my system, and that was what my system was designed for — it was an audiophile system; but when I replaced my existing preamp with the Shindo Vosne Romanee, I got the good music sound. I was relaxed, my fingers were tapping to the beats by themselves; I was no longer cursing the Indian record engineers for making such poor recordings out of such divine music. And for the first time, in over a decade of audiophilia, I could listen to a sitar playing on a CD and feel like I was listening to the real thing.

It was Art Dudley’s (AD) review that put the Shindo Vosne Romanee (VR) in my thought-o-sphere, I have read that review 50 or more times in a past 5-6 years. It is by far best piece of audio writing I have read. Just the writing convinced me that the muse behind the writing, the Shindo VR preamp, must be special. But I could not afford a brand new Shindo VR at $22,000; it was way beyond my means, and for years and years, a 230V version never came up in the second-hand market; and so I settled for two amplification systems: A Nagra tube system, and an Accuphase integrated system. I was happy, kind of.

Building a good hi-fi system is like building a good cricket team (or a football or basketball team). In your hi-fi system your team consists of your components (the Cables (speaker, interconnect, digital), DAC, the Transport, the Preamplifier, the Amplifier, the Speaker, the Room — to name a few. The team-members should be individual stars but also work synergistically as a team.

My current Nagra (a Swiss audio brand) system was a hard task-master; it made beautiful sound but it demanded the best from its hifi teammates, but there was always the weakest link: the music material.

Indian classical music doesn’t have a reputation for good recordings, indeed there are not many CDs (that I know of) that an audiophile would claim are well recorded. And the Nagra system showed the inadequacies of my hifi team with magnifying glass. It let me know that my room was untreated and lively, my music material badly recorded. Listening to sitar on the Nagra system was a futile endeavour, it sounded thin, listless and sterile. My Accuphase amplifier was more easygoing; sitars and other Indian strings were far more listenable, it served the music, not the equipment; but once you heard the Nagra, you kept wishing the Accuphase had the same resolution, transparency and cleanness in the sound. I was in a dilemma: I am at heart a music lover, I want to listen to good music, not good recordings. And I want to listen to Indian classical music.

But then out of the blue, a Shindo VR came up for sale in Singapore, it was a serial #40 (same production batch as AD’s Shindo VR — serial #34). I jumped on it. The Shindo VR became the MS Dhoni of my hi-fi system.

MS Dhoni, aged 40, recently lead a rag-tag team of newbies and rejects to championship victory in the savagely competitive IPL tournament. Under his tutelage, the reject batsmen became a powerhouse run-getter, the newbie bowler the top-three wicket-taker of the tournament. And Dhoni himself, with his lightning stumpings and hard hitting, lead the team from the front.

The Shindo VR is the MS Dhoni of my hi-fi team. The VR is old, a 2010 model; but some of its components are even older — with  capacitors, vacuum tubes, even resistors collected made in the 1950s! Shindo-san was reputed to have known the sound of every resistor and capacitor and diode and tube he used in his system, and he drew on the best to voice his creations. 

Shindo VR and its teammates

The VR placed in my system elevated it to a championship level performance. Now instead of pointing at deficiencies of each its hi-fi teammate it brought out their strengths: 

• Replacing my existing Nagra preamp, it now showcased the Nagra amplifier’s glorious detail retrieval but masked its ruthless transparency by adding “musicality”, elevating its performance to an astonishing magnitude. 

• Adding it to my Accuphase integrated, it spotlit Accuphase’s musicality taking it to a new level, while giving it the transparency and resolution that the integrated amp lacked. 

• It played music out of my Hindustani classical CDs and instead of highlighting their recording deficiencies it opened up to me the soul of the music, the texture of instruments, the emotions of the artiste. Suddenly I realised, my CDs were just fine, they just needed the right system; and just like that I had found the path to audio nirvana. 

Now your typical audiophile reading the previous paragraph may counter: perhaps your Shindo Vosne-Romanee is just imposing its sound character on your system, masking its defects; or perhaps your Shindo VR is just ”coloured” — a typical audiophile epithet that usually means anything to nothing.

We all hear differently, one man’s music is another man’s coloured sound. But in my experience the Shindo VR is the most resolving and transparent preamp I have heard (even more than Nagra Jazz which I have owned or anything else by far), I heard new sounds in well-know-by-me recordings that I hadn’t heard before; and music coming from Shindo preamp is the closest to live music I have heard — the sounds of Sitar from a Nikhil Banerjee CD was very akin the sound I heard from a live sitar being played by Ustad Nishaad Khan (same texture, same reverberations, same liveliness) in Goa a few months ago. Isn’t that the goal of every audiophile? To make his hi-fi system sound like live music in all its glorious musical details?

I own a lot of Bob Dylan CDs from his 60s albums, and recently I bought a hi-res recording of his 1997 album Time out of Mind. It is very clear that the hi-res album sounds better but that is not the point; under the Shindo VR regime, I don’t need the “best recording” to enjoy the music. Shindo-san somehow managed to cocktail the musicality of yesteryear vintage audio with the resolution and transparency of modern audio. I am now listening to CD after CD after CD, something I never been able to do before.

The new captain of my hi-fi team the Shindo Vosnee Romanee, is now my most prized hi-fi possession. Leading from the front, it has taken my hi-fi team to a new height. My audiophile quest for last decade, chasing that ideal sound that was in my head, is now over, but a new journey has begun — I now want to build an all Shindo system. The promise that it can get much better is salivating. Next stop — a Shindo amplifier. I can hardly wait!