Art Dudley Listening

Everything you know is wrong.—The Firesign Theatre

The Swissonor TA10, a contemporary tonearm designed for the Thorens TD 124 turntable (1959–1970), challenged me to set aside some of the things I thought I knew about phonography. On at least one of those counts, it succeeded.

Handmade in Switzerland and modeled on the Thorens TP 14 tonearm of the 1960s, the TA10 ($3990) improves on its predecessor with an effective length of 240mm, which Swissonor says is the longest that can be achieved with a stock TD 124 armboard (the TP 14's effective length was only 210mm), and replaces the non-universal plug and socket of the TP 14's removable headshell with the more common SME standard found on most contemporary headshells, pickup heads, and tonearms. The TA10 also replaces the TP 14's stamped-steel bearing housing with one machined from aluminum, and adds their own original arm-lift design: a chunky, cam-style mechanism that provides non-abrupt cuing without the need for damping fluid.

The TA10 is a J-shaped tonearm with an offset of 35.5°; its vertical bearings are oriented with an identical offset, to ensure a full range of vertical arm movement without changes in cartridge azimuth. Two counterweights are supplied: one for cartridge/headshell combinations of 18–30gm, the other for those weighing 30–50gm. The downforce is static, and set by leveling the arm, then adjusting the position of the counterweight for the desired downforce. (The TP 14 offered dynamic downforce by means of an adjustable spring.) Within each counterweight, a rubber O-ring adds a degree of compliance to the interface of weight and armtube; four user-adjustable setscrews, spaced around the perimeter of the weight, apply variable pressure to the ring, and thus a means of fine-tuning compliance—a nice touch.

Sounds like a straightforward, conservatively engineered product, doesn't it? Yes, indeed. Now fasten your seatbelts.

Seriously
Swissonor, many of whose products are sold by the Thorens-refurbishing specialists at Schopper AG, also based in Switzerland (see "Listening" columns passim), is a company with a vision: these guys are serious—about the Thorens TD 124 in particular, and about their distinctly music-oriented and altogether uncompromising approach to domestic audio in general.

The first Swissonor product to cross my attention was their replacement platter for the TD 124, precision-machined from a non-ferromagnetic alloy, and marked with the same strobe markings as the original. (Original Thorens platters were made of magnetically permeable iron alloy, to which most phono cartridges feel an unhealthy attraction.) I shudder to think how much it must have cost Swissonor to tool up to make such a thing, just as I wonder if they've sold enough to recoup that investment. (The Swissonor platter is still available, for an eminently reasonable $1100.) For a small, independent, audio-only company to invest in the design and manufacture of such a thing for a turntable that hasn't been in production since Igor Stravinsky walked the Earth is remarkable—and that's not to mention Swissonor's replacement for the TD 124's shell-like upper platter, made from aluminum by means of spin-forming, a lost art on a par with the winding of transformers. As I said: serious.

It wasn't until I saw a TA10 in person that I could fully appreciate that seriousness. The arm is shipped in a specially made, two-part box of dense fiberboard held together with staples and rivets. It comes preinstalled (footnote 1) on a proprietary Swissonor armboard (I'll return to that in a moment) that is itself bolted to three wooden supports fastened to the box's bottom half. The arm rest and cuing device are also prefastened to the board, as is a roughly L-shaped underboard bracket that provides support and strain relief for the phono cables, which are presoldered and neatly dressed. The shipping box is topped with a label bearing that arm's version number, something I didn't notice until I'd received my second review sample (but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Cheered by how much of my usual tonearm-setup work had already been done for me, I unfastened the Swissonor armboard from the packing, noting that one of the three wooden supports had come loose—yet the armboard and arm were still held tightly in place, and the wandering support appeared not to have wreaked any havoc. I was face to face at last with a tonearm that, until June 2017, I had only read about—and I was shocked to see that the armboard's three bolt-holes were fitted with soft, rubbery grommets that protruded below the board's surface: The Swissonor board, which is machined from a composite of fiber and phenolic, is meant to be mounted on the turntable compliantly. Recovering Linnie that I am, this bit of apostasy made me feel like a Roman Catholic (I'm one of those, too) whose parish priest has just invited him to a bar to attend a combination orgy and swearing contest during Lent: surely, any degree of compliance between tonearm and turntable will result in the dreaded condition known across Earth's flat expanse as Loss of the Tune. I resigned myself to using the product as the manufacturer intended, but made a mental note to try it without the grommets before the review period ended, and set about installing armboard and arm on my own TD 124.

It was then that I had another surprise: The Swissonor didn't fit. My TD 124 is mounted on a stacked-plywood plinth of my own making, and though I'd drilled the right-rear corner of my plinth with an opening large enough to accommodate the undercarriage hardware of various other tonearms, the TA10's pillar and cable bracket wouldn't clear. (Most original and contemporary TD 124 plinths, the latter including Schopper's most popular model, are frame-style structures with generous openings under the turntable's armboard area.) Swissonor's thorough and reasonably well-translated instruction manual anticipates this, informing the user that the TA10's phono-cable bracket can be rotated to alter its position and thus clear solid "consoles." That helped a little, but my plinth still obstructed the arm pillar. Installation was halted until I could whittle, grind, and file away enough plywood to make things work. It was my own darn fault. I never anticipated needing to create an open area beneath the rearmost end of the TD 124's armboard—but that's the very portion of the board that Swissonor must press into service to make a 240mm tonearm fit where a 210mm arm usually goes.

After that chore—the last big mess I made in my Cherry Valley workshop before our move to a new home!—I installed the armboard and arm with ease and fitted the TA10's large counterweight, along with a lingering review sample of the Ortofon SPU #1S pickup head. (The Ortofon got my vote for Budget Component of 2017; as I write this, I don't yet know how it fared in the voting overall.) Because the TD 124 was still on my bench, I decided to assess the tonearm's bearings before carrying the player back upstairs and putting it in my system.

Twist my arm
My first really good turntable—indeed, the first high-end audio product I ever owned, not counting the vintage McIntosh tuner I bought in the early 1970s and kept for only a short time without fully appreciating just how good it was—was a Rega Research Planar 2, purchased new in 1979 or so.

At the time, the Planar 2 was bundled with a Japanese-made Lustre tonearm, which I came to regard as the weak link in that budget-perfectionist record player. (The titanically superior RB300 tonearm, designed and made by Rega themselves, wouldn't appear until 1983.) My Planar 2 sounded better overall than the budget turntable it replaced, but on dynamic peaks I nevertheless heard from it a hard-sounding distortion not unlike the sound of a mistracking phono cartridge—and my entry-level Dynavector cartridge had never produced such a sound before being installed in the Lustre. It was during my efforts to diagnose the problem that I hit on a repeatable and reliable method of detecting excess friction in a tonearm's vertical bearings: "floating" an arm by setting its downforce mechanism (if any) to zero and adjusting the counterweight to achieve perfect balance, then watching carefully to see if the tonearm tube, when nudged up or down, returns to the same resting position, and noting the speed and apparent ease with which it does so.

The Lustre arm failed that test—miserably. As I described in this space more than 11 years ago, I learned a valuable lesson when I tried to solve my problem by returning to my Rega dealer and trading in my Planar 2 for a Planar 3, on the assumption that the Lustre arm on the more expensive Planar 3 would be of better quality than the one on the Planar 2. It was a naïve assumption, of course, and one that I never had the chance to test: When I returned to my apartment and unpacked my new Rega, I realized that my salesman, the store's turntable specialist, had swapped my old arm onto the new turntable.

Shouted epithets, not all of them from me, followed in short order. Reached by phone, the hi-fi salesman began by lying. (I know what you're thinking, and you may rest assured that I, too, was shocked.) But when he realized that I had him to rights, he changed tactics and blamed me: "Why can't you stop obsessing about audiophile nonsense and just enjoy the music?"

In other circumstances, that salesman's condescension might have been justified. Heck, I've thought and said and written the same thing myself when confronted with hobbyists who readjust tonearm height for each record they play, or devise elaborate systems for adjusting speaker toe-in from their seats. I intend to have his advice carved on my tombstone. I'll even instruct my survivors to dig a hole that goes all the way to hell and post a sign: "DEPOSIT SYSTEM DEMAGNETIZERS HERE." But objecting to being stuck with a defective product is never nonsense. For a person who knows the value of a dollar, it's the only reasonable response.

Back to modern times: I'm sorry to say the Swissonor TA10 was as poor as the Lustre in this regard. After floating the armtube, I found that, within a small range of movement concomitant with that of normal record playback, the armtube would stay wherever I put it, unfazed by such theoretical constructs as gravity and static balance. Obviously, one or both of its vertical bearings were sources of considerable friction.

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Footnote 1: A boardless version is available for those who wish to use the TA10 on turntables other than the Thorens TD 124.