“This sure looks interesting,” I thought to myself when I saw the announcement of the Victrola Stream Sapphire turntable during the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show last January. It might strike some readers as weird to see a Victrola turntable reviewed on an audiophile website. The legendary brand, now owned by Innovative Technology Electronics LLC in Denver, CO, is better known for novelty audio products like suitcase record players and countertop jukeboxes than it is for serious hi-fi components.
But the Stream Sapphire is a serious-looking turntable. Priced at $1299.99 (all prices in USD), the belt-driven spinner comes with an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge premounted in a headshell that attaches to the business end of its carbon-fiber tonearm.
The Stream Sapphire is the new flagship of Victrola’s lineup of wireless turntables. The Hi-Res Onyx ($399.99) and Hi-Res Carbon ($599.99) are Bluetooth models. Victrola’s Stream Onyx ($599.99), Stream Pearl ($799.99), and Stream Carbon (also $799.99) all have ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity and Works with Sonos certification. They can transmit audio over a home network to Sonos devices.
Likewise, the Stream Sapphire has Works with Sonos certification. But unlike the other Stream models, it can also transmit lossless 24-bit/48kHz PCM audio to UPnP devices, such as the KEF LS60 Wireless active loudspeaker system in my living room. In fact, a blog post on Victrola’s website lists the LS60 Wireless as one of the “Recommended UPnP-Enabled Speakers” for the Stream Sapphire. The ability to stream lossless PCM audio to UPnP devices is what grabbed my attention when I first read about the Stream Sapphire.
As soon as I read about this turntable, I knew I wanted to get one in for review. It took a few months for this to happen, but in late November, a review sample of the Stream Sapphire landed on my front porch, courtesy of Erikson Consumer, the company that distributes Victrola products in Canada, where I live.
Description
The Stream Sapphire has an unusual, and striking, industrial design. It measures 4.4″H × 19.6″W × 13.6″D and weighs 14.7 pounds, including the supplied dustcover.
The MDF plinth is covered on the top, sides, and rear in an attractive walnut veneer, with radiused edges along the sides on both the top and bottom. The satin-finished aluminum front panel looks like it belongs on an electronic component rather than a turntable. On the far right of the panel is a large illuminated control knob that can be used for adjusting volume, initiating a Sonos playback session, or performing a factory reset.
The 1.54-pound, one-piece aluminum platter sits almost flush with the top surface of the plinth. It’s surrounded by an aluminum ring with the same satin finish as the front panel. The platter is pretty lively—flick it with your finger and it will ring for a couple of seconds—but is damped effectively by the supplied black silicone mat. To the right of the platter, at the rear of the top surface, is a rotary speed control with 33, 0, and 45 positions; next to it is a receptacle for the supplied aluminum 45-rpm adapter. The tonearm is on the far right. The 45-rpm adapter, speed control, tonearm plate, bearing assembly, counterweight, cueing mechanism, tonearm support, and headshell all have the same satin finish as the front panel. The arm tube has a shinier finish with a funky spiral pattern. This is a very stylish package.
At the back of the turntable are a pair of RCA output jacks, a ground terminal, and a two-prong inlet for the supplied 6′ power cord. An important note: the Stream Sapphire has a built-in phono preamp (a necessity for the streaming function), and the phono stage is not defeatable. That means the Stream Sapphire outputs line-level audio through its RCA jacks. So if you’re hardwiring the turntable to an amplifier or a set of active or powered speakers, don’t connect it to the phono input jacks—use the line-level inputs. Advice to this effect is included in the online Victrola Stream Guide, but not in the instruction manual packaged with the turntable or in the companion Victrola Stream app.
On the bottom of the Stream Sapphire are four height-adjustable feet that are said to isolate the ’table from external vibration. I had to wonder: why four feet? It would be much easier to level the turntable if it had only three feet. One other nit: to lock the tonearm in its support column, the cueing lever has to be in the down position, which means you have to remember to raise the cueing control before playing a record. But, the Stream Sapphire also has a welcome feature for a streaming turntable, which may be sited in a different room than the speakers playing the music: the motor automatically stops at the end of the record, saving wear on the stylus.
Rather than a hinged dustcover, the Stream Sapphire comes with a sculpted dustcover that sits flat on the top surface of the turntable. There’s a raised area that extends down the right side to cover the tonearm, and a hole to let the speed control protrude. The part of the dustcover that covers the platter has a raised area in the middle, so that the cover is supported by the label area of any record that happens to be on the platter.
Inside the plinth is a phono preamp, Wi-Fi radio, network adapter, an analog-to-digital converter, and the circuitry that enables the Stream Sapphire to transmit audio to Sonos and UPnP devices over a home network.
Setup and software
I’ve had some hair-pulling experiences setting up streaming audio components, but setting up the Stream Sapphire was a breeze. In fact, the Victrola ’table provided one of the smoothest out-of-box experiences of any product I’ve ever reviewed or purchased.
The first thing you see when you open the eco-friendly packaging (it’s mostly cardboard) is a cardboard cover with a big QR code and below it, in eight languages, an instruction to “Scan to start streaming.” After scanning that code with my Apple iPhone 14, I received a link to an area of Apple’s App Store where I could download the Victrola Stream app.
Below that instructional cardboard sheet is the dustcover, and below that, the turntable itself. The bottom layer of the carton contains the platter (with the drive belt looped around the integrated subplatter), mat, headshell with premounted Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge, power cord, counterweight, and 45-rpm adapter. I removed and set aside all those parts, placed the turntable on a small drawer unit in my second-floor home office, then fired up the Victrola Stream app.
The app guided me through the setup process, step by step: putting the platter in place and looping the belt around the motor pulley, attaching the headshell to the tonearm, identifying the supplied cartridge (the same app is used for all Stream turntables, and different models come with different cartridges), removing the stylus guard, and attaching the counterweight. There is no need to balance the tonearm. Instead, the app instructs you to align the counterweight with a groove on the tonearm. In that position, vertical tracking force is correct for the supplied cartridge. I could find almost nothing about mechanical setup that was left to chance by the app. The only exception was turntable leveling, which is not mentioned in the app or instruction manual.
The next step was Wi-Fi setup. The Victrola Stream app listed all available Wi-Fi networks. When I chose mine, the app prompted me to enter my network password, choose a name or location for the turntable, and confirm my country and region, after which the turntable was connected to my home network.
Now it was time to configure the turntable. The app prompted me to choose a default speaker to use with the turntable’s Autoplay function. When I clicked the prompt, another screen appeared offering an option to set either a Sonos or UPnP device as the default. Since I don’t own any Sonos products, I chose UPnP, after which the app showed all the UPnP devices on my home network, including the KEF LS60 system in my living room and the Bowers & Wilkins Panorama 3 soundbar in my basement. I chose the LS60. Now, whenever I started playing a record, the Stream Sapphire would automatically send audio to the KEF system, as long as it was powered up and the Wi-Fi input was selected. There’s also a Quickplay option that lets you stream audio to other networked audio components in your home.
The Streaming Mode function in the Streaming Settings menu offers three options. Prioritize Connection is intended for applications where network performance is causing audio dropouts. The default setting, Standard, “balances audio quality and connection quality.” Prioritize Audio Quality sends uncompressed PCM audio to devices that can accept it.
With the Standard setting, the Stream Sapphire sent a 192kbps MP3 stream to my KEF system; with the Prioritize Connection setting, it sent 96kbps MP3 audio. I chose the Prioritize Audio Quality setting, and the KEF Connect app confirmed that the LS60 system was receiving a 24/48 FLAC stream.
I experienced no dropouts at all during the review period. I was able to use the control knob on the Stream Sapphire to adjust the LS60’s output level. It’s worth noting that the volume control does not alter the stream; it changes the volume setting on the playback device. When I tweaked the volume knob on the ’table, the volume slider in the KEF Connect app shifted accordingly.
False start
From opening the carton, it took only 15 minutes to complete setup—like I said, smooth. Now it was time to play some music.
I started with a reissue of The Köln Concert by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett (ECM 1064/65 272 7888). About a second after I dropped the needle, music began to play from my KEF LS60 system in the living room, and I sat down for a listen. At first, everything seemed fine. But then I noticed that sustained notes and chords sounded a little sour and seemed to wobble slightly in pitch.
Was it the turntable? I loaded the RPM Speed & Wow app onto my Google Pixel 4a 5G smartphone and took some measurements. The results varied slightly from measurement to measurement, but here are some typical results. At the 33⅓-rpm setting, actual speed was 32.61 rpm (2.23% slow) and wow was a worrisome ±0.48%. At the 45-rpm setting, actual speed was 44.26 rpm (1.68% slow) and wow was ±0.57%. Those results are considerably worse than Victrola’s specifications, which are inconsistent. According to the web page for the Stream Sapphire, wow and flutter is “< 0.25 [sic].” According to the downloadable spec sheet, wow and flutter is < 0.175%, and speed variance is ±0.6% at 33⅓ rpm and ±0.5% at 45 rpm.
I reported my experience to Erikson Consumer. “What you’re experiencing with your Victrola turntable is definitely not normal,” their marketing coordinator replied. “The flutter readings are far too high. We will work on sending you a new turntable for your review immediately.”
The replacement arrived a week later. After unpacking and setting it up, I took a fresh set of measurements with the RPM Speed & Wow app. At the 33⅓-rpm setting, actual speed was 32.83 rpm (1.53% slow) and wow was ±0.35%. At the 45-rpm setting, actual speed was 44.53 rpm (1.06% slow) and wow was ±0.41%. Opinions vary, but wow is generally considered to be audible at levels over 0.25%, especially with solo instruments whose notes do not vary in pitch, such as piano.
Time to listen
The measured results of the new review sample were better than the initial sample, but still short of Victrola’s specifications. How would this translate to listening? I put The Köln Concert on the replacement ’table, started it spinning, and set volume in the KEF Connect app to a moderately high level. Before dropping the needle, I went downstairs and put one ear about 6″ from one of the KEF system’s Uni-Q drivers. From that distance, I heard very faint hiss; from a foot away, noise was inaudible. The Stream Sapphire’s phono stage and other electronic circuitry are obviously very quiet.
As with the first review sample, the tone of Jarrett’s piano was somewhat sour, and long notes and chords had some unsteadiness in pitch. Were these problems as severe as they were with the first review sample? I couldn’t say, because by then the first sample had been sent back to Erickson Consumer. But the problem was severe enough to affect my enjoyment of this landmark album.
That’s a shame, because there was much to admire about the way the Stream Sapphire rendered Jarrett’s playing. His rapid-fire runs were nicely articulated. And I got a clear sense of the acoustics of the opera house in Köln, Germany, where this 1975 concert took place.
A caution is in order here. There were problems with the piano used for that concert—was that what I was hearing? To answer that question, I streamed a hi-rez download of the album in my digital library to the KEF system via Roon. On the digital stream, Jarrett’s piano was purer in tone and also noticeably higher in pitch. The wobbliness that bothered me when streaming the LP from the Stream Sapphire was not noticeable on the digital stream.
Next up was a secondhand copy of a 1971 album of overtures by the 19th-century Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (Deutsche Grammophon 2530 144). I chose the William Tell Overture, partly because it’s well known even by people unfamiliar with classical music (the theme for The Lone Ranger is taken from the piece), but mainly because it’s the last track on side 2, which is almost 28 minutes long, and contains loud passages on the innermost grooves. That makes it a useful track for assessing the tracking abilities of the tonearm and cartridge.
During the loudest parts of the “Storm” section and the “Finale: March of the Swiss Soldiers” (Hi-ho, Silver!), I noticed some mild congestion, and orchestral tone became a tad harsh, but I heard no evidence at all of mistracking. The quieter passages were lovely. In the gentle first section, “Prelude: Dawn,” the cellos and double basses had delicious woody tone and clearly defined locations at the very front of the soundstage.
The soundstage had satisfying depth. The quiet timpani rolls later in “Prelude: Dawn,” heralding an approaching storm, were clearly behind the string section. They were well resolved, with the mallet strikes segueing convincingly into resonance of the drum bodies. Lateral imaging was slightly vague. For example, the woodwinds and brass instruments were clearly behind the strings, but it was hard to pinpoint their exact locations. In my experience, that’s typical of DG recordings of this era. Not only that, it’s more representative of the concert-hall experience.
During the pastoral section, “Ranz des vaches” (call to the cows), there’s an extended dialog between a solo cor anglais and a flute, and here I could hear the effect of the Victrola’s speed fluctuations. The tone of the cor anglais was a little sour, and it seemed to wobble slightly in pitch. To make sure that I wasn’t experiencing some form of expectation bias, I cued up the same performance from Qobuz and played that section again. With the digital stream, the tone of the cor anglais was sweeter and there was no wobble, and it was slightly higher in pitch than the analog version I streamed from the Victrola ’table.
My final selection was “The Night of Santiago” from Leonard Cohen’s extraordinary posthumous album Thanks for the Dance (Legacy 19075978661). The different tonalities of the acoustic guitars were clearly presented—one on the far left having a jangly metallic character, another on the far right sounding rich and woody. In the center was Cohen’s voice, speaking more than singing, his voice rich and deep, completely natural, and surprisingly vigorous for someone close to death. (Maybe he was invigorated by the subject of the song, an assignation with a willing partner.) Every element had a clear location on a wide, deep soundstage. My only disappointment was some long piano chords that had some wobble, but despite that, this track was immensely enjoyable streamed from the Victrola ’table.
Comparison
I compared the Stream Sapphire with my Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo turntable, which sits on another small table in my second-floor office. I’ve made a few upgrades to that turntable, the most important being an Ortofon 2M Blue stylus. That worked out well here, because both ’tables had identical cartridges. To stream music to the LS60 system, I connected the Pro-Ject’s RCA outputs to a Bluesound Hub, connected a Bluesound Node streamer to the coaxial S/PDIF input on my KEF system, and set the BluOS app to transmit a 24/48 FLAC stream from the Hub to the Node. This is the setup I wrote about in my December 1 feature on using physical media with Simplifi’d music systems.
For this comparison, I borrowed a second copy of Thanks for the Dance from my sister-in-law and her husband, who live a few blocks for me. That made it possible for me to listen to “The Night of Santiago” on the two turntables without having to run upstairs to swap records. On the Pro-Ject ’table, Cohen’s voice was not as deep, but that’s because the pitch was a little higher. His voice seemed a little more three-dimensional and embodied through the Pro-Ject table, and the transient attacks of the guitar notes were slightly crisper. The various instruments of this song were more clearly outlined. There was no unsteadiness in those piano chords.
Likewise, on the William Tell Overture, the cor anglais in the pastoral section was sweeter-toned on the Pro-Ject turntable, and so were the cellos in the opening prelude. There was none of the sourness and wobble I heard when I spun this record on the Victrola. Groups of instruments were more clearly delineated on the Pro-Ject ’table. In the loud passages during the “Storm” section and finale, the presentation was a little more transparent.
There was one other difference in the two setups. With the Pro-Ject, I sometimes experienced dropouts when streaming from the Bluesound Hub in my second-floor office to the Bluesound Node in the main-floor living room. Throughout my testing, I never experienced network hiccups with the Stream Sapphire.
Conclusion
I’m torn about the Victrola Stream Sapphire streaming turntable. The industrial design is striking, and, to my eyes, gorgeous. The feature set is tailor-made for Simplifi’d hi-fi. The setup process is fantastically simple. The Victrola Stream app is easy to navigate and works reliably. All options are clearly explained. In my tests, streaming was completely reliable.
And there were many aspects of the Stream Sapphire’s sonic performance that I admired. The tonearm and cartridge tracked even challenging records reliably. Soundstaging and imaging were very good. There were many moments when I just leaned back and enjoyed the sounds this beautiful record player was sending to my KEF speakers. But there’s no getting around the fact that the speed fluctuations were a disappointment. This should not happen with a turntable at this price level, even a model as feature-rich as the Stream Sapphire.
Was I super unlucky? Did I receive not one, but two defective samples? That’s a possibility—maybe there was a bad production run, perhaps with belts that were a tad too loose or bearings that were out-of-spec. But it’s also possible that this is a flawed design. I’m sure many listeners will not be bothered by the unsteadiness of pitch I heard on some records. For others, this will be a deal-breaker. It is for me.
. . . Gordon Brockhouse
Associated Equipment
- Active loudspeakers: KEF LS60 Wireless
- Turntable: Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo with Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge, Debut Alu subplatter, Acryl it platter
- Control devices: Apple iPhone 14, Google Pixel 4a 5G smartphones
- Streamer: Bluesound Node with Bluesound Hub
- Network: Google Wifi four-node mesh network
Victrola Stream Sapphire streaming turntable and Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge
Price: $1299.99
Warranty: Two years, parts and labor
Innovative Technology Electronics LLC
3350 Walnut St.
Denver, CO 80205-2430
Phone: 1-877-483-2497
Website: www.victrola.com
Canadian distributor:
Erikson Consumer—An Exertis | JAM business
Baie-D’Urfé, QC H9X 4B7
Phone: 1-800-567-3275
Website: www.eriksonconsumer.com
