• Mono and Stereo Element 110 Review
• Element 116MX Spy Photos
• Once on a Mantle (a Nerdy Boys Mystery)
• List your used Merrill Audio equipment for sale here
  Master Tape Head Pre Amp for Sale by Dealer

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Mono & Stereo Element 110
​
Power Amplifiers
​
Monoblocks Review

Read the review which came out July 31, 2025 by Matej Isak.
​Here are a couple of quotes:​
"At current pricing, Merrill Audio establishes an intriguing market threshold without typical competitive posturing. The ELEMENT 110’s potent core challenges myths about sub-$15k electronics."

"For their stand-out performance and overall value, I am proud to grant the Merrill Audio ELEMENT 110 monoblock amplifiers the Mono & Stereo’s 2025 Highly Recommended Award."

Element 116MX
​
Spy Photos

Once on a Mantle
​
(a Nerdy Boys Mystery)

By Mark Block,
​When my future wife was on vacation in Mexico, she had dinner at a restaurant with strolling mariachi musicians. Spotting a pretty tourist, the band came over to her table and made her join in with their rendition of “Guantanamera.” Unsure of the words, she had a mondegreen moment, blurting out, “Once on a mantle / why were we once on a mantle?”

Obviously, she had never heard the Weavers' Reunion at Carnegie Hall, 1963 on a high-end stereo system, because Pete Seeger’s vocal is crystal clear and his enunciation impeccable. Ah, but was he on the right or left of the stage? Audio nerds want to know! Some releases of this audiophile fave, recorded on May 2nd and 3rd in 1963, have the channels reversed, and it makes a difference: We know something is off, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Two of my friends started using “Guantanamera” as a reference track after hearing it in Klaus Bunge’s Odyssey room at the Capital Audio Fest. Klaus’s room, cleverly eccentric in a way that perhaps matches his personality, is always dimly lit by a forest of faux candles on the floor. It invites the question: Will this be an audio demo or a strip show? As it turns out, it’s pure audio porn—a hallucinogenic display of what a stereo soundstage can be. Pete Seeger is off to the right, slightly behind and outside the loudspeaker, with Ronnie Gilbert in the middle. The speakers disappear, and for the moment, we are transported back in time to a front-row seat at the concert.

Klaus always plays Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions reissue, mastered by Doug Sax in 1991 from the 3-track original master tape. I have the gold CD, not the LP, and it sounds terrific. It also sounds great in Alan Hyman’s room, with Magico speakers and Merrill amps. But Klaus’s room is my gold standard for how it should sound.

At the CAF last year, Scot Markwell of Elite Audio Video played his Classic Records 45rpm LPs, mastered in 2004 by Bernie Grundman from the 3-track master. I didn’t get to hear it, but my nerd friends reported that it sounded awesome, with Pete singing “Guantanamera” while steadfastly standing on the right. So Bernie Grundman and Doug Sax, working from the original master tape, agreed on which channel was which. Who else mastered the album from the original 3-track tape? Kevin Gray did, when he created an SACD release for Chad Kassem. But how can I play that without an SACD player? Where there’s a will, there’s a Wimoweh. Alan Hyman was able to rip the SACD stereo layer to dsf files. Hey Lilee Lilee Lo and behold, Pete is on the right.

However, I heard Pete Seeger on the left in most rooms at CAF because they were streaming from Qobuz, Apple Music or Spotify. Or they were playing the album from a Vanguard release (LP, CD or tape). A couple of friends remarked that Klaus’s room sounded nice, but he had the channels backwards. They were very familiar with that song on their own systems, where Pete was on the left, so they assumed Bunge must have bungled the wiring.

This gets into what I call the Audio Uncertainty Principle, or Floyd Toole’s “Circle of Confusion.” No one really knows what the album is supposed to sound like except for the mixing engineer — but they don’t know either! The mixing studio is far from perfect, and bad sh*t can happen at every link in the chain from recording to mixing to mastering to production to playback in the consumer’s home. What was the producer’s intent? Did the original mastering engineer at Vanguard get it right, or should we trust in Sax, Gray and Grundman? Perhaps historical evidence holds a clue.

There is that photo on the cover. It shows seven performers crowded around three microphones spaced about four feet apart. Isn’t that the way we should hear the recording? No. For one thing, Pete Seeger is in the middle of the picture. It might have been taken at a rehearsal or at a photo session for publicity purposes. Further, the performers move around from one track on the album to another, so a single picture can’t prove anything.

I’d love to ask Bernie Grundman and Kevin Gray about it, but they’re busy guys who probably wouldn’t remember the details of one mastering session over two decades ago. I did ask Chad Kassem, but he had no recollection of an issue with the channels. “I do not remember anybody ever mentioning or asking me about the channels being reversed…. I doubt Doug Sax made a mistake.”

I reached out to Michael Fremer at Tracking Angle because, well, no one on the planet (analogue or otherwise) knows more about vinyl than Michael. He was not aware of the channel reversal brouhaha, but he did me the favor of checking his LPs. “Just played Chad’s original cut by Doug Sax and the 45rpm Classic edition cut by Bernie, and both have Ed Norton singing out of the right channel!” Yes, Ed Norton flat-out nailed that part (because he had a hammer, not an axe, as rumored).

Michael noted that the classic “Getz/Gilberto” has the same left/right controversy. Indeed! Astrud Gilberto’s voice is sometimes in the right channel, sometimes in the left. Kevin Gray noticed the problem when he cut the album for Speakers Corner in 1999, so he corrected it, putting the lovely Astrud in the left channel. George Marino at Sterling Sound did the same when he cut the Analogue Productions 45rpm set in 2011. https://trackingangle.com/music/impex-s-1step-double-45-getz-gilberto-tells-the-full-story-sonically-and-otherwise​

​Scott Markwell was the OG setup guy for HP, and was at Mike Hobson’s Classic Records when Grundman remastered the album. Did he remember anything about channel orientation? He apologized for not having anything further to offer, other than this sage advice: “I tend not to worry over that stuff so much and just play records.”

So if you hear Pete Seeger on the left in “Guantanamera,” consider walking over to the preamp and reversing the channels. Or not. (Wouldn’t the left have been more to Pete’s liking?)

One last mystery: Which is the best sounding? I’ve ripped or downloaded a bunch: 16/44.1 from the gold CD mastered by Doux Sax; 24/96 from the DAD mastered by Bernie Grundman; DSD64 from the SACD mastered by Kevin Gray; 16/44.1 from Qobuz (which was provided to the streaming services from Vanguard, digitally mastered in 1987); and 24/352.8 DXD from High Definition Tape Transfers (sourced from a a high-quality commercial 4-track tape and mastered by Bob Witrak). Whew!

The winner is … I dunno. They all sound great, and my opinion has changed several times as I've evaluated the sound quality. For one thing, my preamp doesn’t allow me to level match with the required precision. For the record, digitally speaking, here are the Audacity numbers for “Guantanamera.”

Grundman: Stereo RMS = -29.7571; level compensation required for 0dB = 5.709
​Sax: Stereo RMS = -27.4282; level compensation required for 0dB = 2.849
​Gray: Stereo RMS = -30.0089; level compensation required for 0dB = 8.265
​Witrak: Stereo RMS = -25.8317; level compensation required for 0dB = 2.196
​Qobuz: Stereo RMS = 30.0139; level compensation required for 0dB = 7.042

All of these versions are flat transfers without added EQ or compression. I liken compression to looking at a beautiful landscape through fogged binoculars; the details are bigger and yet somehow more obscure. None of that here! But a dirty little secret: There’s not a lot of high-frequency content on the master tape. On every version, Audacity shows the response dropping off a cliff starting at about 8k.

Twist my arm and I’ll confess to preferring Kevin Gray’s SACD. That might be a function of all the ultrasonic DSD64 noise subconsciously tickling my dog-like ears. [Joking.] Or it might be a function of how my RME ADI-2/4 Pro SE DAC converts the dsf files. There are several ways to do the conversion, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. (I should note that HDTT has DSD64, 128 and 256 available, but Alan and I chose 352.8 DXD, as the release was edited in DXD from a DSD256 Master. Bob recommends DSD256, by the way.) Anyway, Gray’s transfer sounds smooth and spacious. Sax’s transfer has a trace of pleasant warmth. Grundman’s strikes me as the most transparent. I could be imagining this.

I confess to not having listened to the LPs released by Chad and Mike Hobson, which, in the cutting process, were no doubt mastered somewhat differently than their digital counterparts. I’d bet the dynamic range is subjectively spectacular. I’ll need to visit Michael Fremer for that ultimate shootout. And for those on the East Coast, Scot Markwell of Elite A/V will be back at CAF this year (rooms 612 and 614).

Bob Witrak’s transfer is the one with the level set closest to digital 0 (about -.5 on track 12, “Study War No More”). Good! I didn’t have to crank the volume up so much. Even though it was sourced from a tape copy, it sounds lively and detailed, without a trace of added ¼” tape hiss. The album was commercially released on tape back in 1963, so it was probably duplicated at 7.5ips; high-speed duplication became common in the mid ’60s, but this transfer does not suffer from compromised signal-to-noise.

If only Bob had reversed the channels! I can hear readers yelling at me now. “Hey, dummy, just swap the channels in Audacity and export new files at the same resolution!” But then I’d have nothing to bitch about. I’m no mastering engineer—just a lowly nerd trying to get the words “once on a mantle” out of my head. Mondegreens are the worst species of earworm.

Shortage of used Merrill Audio
equipment. List yours here.

All of our demo and used Merrill Audio equipment have been sold.
We have no inventory of used equipment.

Any reader that would like to list any Merrill Audio equipment can send me their contact info and or a link to an ad. I would be happy to list it here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
​Master Tape Head Pre Amp for Sale by
Merrill Audio Dealer.​
​Asking € 6400 - $ 7500. Shipping in Europe is included; Asia or USA 250 extra. The unit has been his demo unit for about 3.5 years.
​Contact info: info@heareverything.nl

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