Spin Doctor

A Visit to SME
It's no secret that I have long been a fan of SME turntables and tonearms. But despite having worked on, set up, or owned hundreds of their products over the last 40 years, I have never had an opportunity to visit the place where they are made. Until now.

Nestled in a sleepy village called Steyning in the south of England, SME still operates from the purpose-built factory they moved into more than 60 years ago (above), although it has been expanded several times.

What struck me first, as I approached the facility, is how the factory is wedged into a tightly packed residential neighborhood, surrounded by small row houses, with kids playing on the tennis courts across the road. SME isn't a loud or polluting business; they live harmoniously with their neighbors.

The main impression I got from my visit is that SME is working hard to find the right balance between their staunchly traditional English roots and modernizing the company to increase efficiency. Founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman (AR-A) died in 2006, but his office has been maintained exactly as he left it, a bit like a shrine, complete with the original mid-century furnishings and wall treatments installed when the factory was expanded in the 1970s, adding a second floor. Those were heady times for SME, when they were making 500 to 600 tonearms a week. The 1983 introduction of the compact disc put the future of high-quality vinyl playback gear into doubt, but SME didn't lose faith. One response was to launch their first turntable, the Model 30, in 1991.

Under AR-A's guiding hand, the company survived the 1990s. After his passing, in 2006, his son Cameron took the helm. Under new leadership, SME shifted focus to the other side of their business: high-precision contract work for aerospace and medical companies. Before long, that work accounted for 70% of SME's turnover. On the audio side, to some audio enthusiasts, they appeared to be losing their edge.

Fast-forward to 2016. SME was sold to Cadence Audio, led by Indian businessman and lifelong audiophile Ajay Shirke. Cadence's portfolio includes three other iconic English brands—Spendor, Garrard, and Loricraft—and two connected Dutch manufacturers, Siltech and Crystal Cable. Most of these names will be familiar to audiophiles, Loricraft perhaps less so than the others; Loricraft is best known today for its record-cleaning machines, though it has had a long association with classic Garrard idler-drive turntables and was included as a part of the deal to acquire the Garrard brand.

Shirke immediately realized that reviving SME's audio business would be a delicate balancing act. There was a desperate need to increase efficiency, but it was important not to lose the brand's reputation for intense attention to fine detail and in-house production of almost all mechanical parts. During my visit, I heard several stories about how slow and inefficient things could be under AR-A's intense control, such as the time he asked an engineer to create a prototype for a small assembly, then refused to look at it when the engineer placed it on his desk a day later, saying it couldn't possibly be any good because it was fabricated far too quickly. Another story tells how hours were spent polishing tonearm parts to a flawless mirror finish even though they would end up covered by satin paint.

To implement his plan to revitalize SME, Shirke brought in aerospace-industry veteran Stuart McNeilis as CEO. In the seven years since McNeilis took the helm, SME has been on a rapid path to upgrade and modernize its manufacturing capabilities. Today the production floor is jammed with new, state-of-the-art machinery jostling for space with legacy equipment that still does the job it was built for. Touring the factory, you really feel they've been here doing this for a very long time. I could practically smell the oil and grease embedded in the building over decades.

This visit was organized for a couple dozen representatives from SME's global distribution network with me tagging along as the only reviewer. After a short introductory talk, we took a step-by-step tour of the factory, with SME's service manager Brian Laker and other members of SME's friendly crew serving as guides. Everyone was there to experience the factory, but the rest of the group also received additional setup training on the lineup of SME products. Because I already have plenty of field experience, working with just about every SME turntable and arm, I used some of this training time to learn a little more about one of Cadence's other brands, Garrard.

This involved a road trip to Ajay Shirke's home, about midway between London and Steyning, which is down near the South Coast. There, I had the opportunity to audition the 301 through Shirke's finely tuned system, using the massive Siltech Symphony loudspeakers and Siltech SAGA electronics. The Garrard 301 was fitted with an SME M2-12R tonearm and an Ortofon Verismo cartridge. Shirke treated me to some very special recordings, including a lacquer recording he had commissioned of a sort of mashup between Indian and Western music. It reminded me of Kavi Alexander's superb recording A Meeting by the River, with Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, only instead of the Mohan veena heard on Kavi's recording, this record used a harmonium. The recording Shirke played, which was engineered by the legendary Tony Faulkner, expanded the recording space into the listening room with astonishing focus and clarity.

Most important was how quiet it sounded. Idler drives like the 301 have a reputation for having tons of boogie and drive, but they can sound a bit noisy and in your face. Not so the SME-rebuilt 301; it was spookily quiet and transparent. The current plan for Garrard—a logical next step beyond the Garrard restoration reviewed by Art Dudley in 2019—is to create fastidious, nuts-and-bolts restorations of classic vintage 301 models, sold in new plinths with SME tonearms. But Shirke also revealed that there are longer term plans to make idler-drive Garrards using all-new designs.

This is starting to sound a bit like a review of Shirke's system, so before I get carried away, it's time to return to Steyning for another demonstration. This time it was Cadence's latest employee, Kat Ourlian, who was running the show, with a direct comparison between three SME turntable models. Some readers may know Kat from her years working as the analog manager for Upscale Audio. Cadence has enticed Kat to pull up roots and move to London, where she will be working as Cadence's global marketing director, based out of their new central-London showroom, the Audio Lounge. I got a chance to visit the Audio Lounge on my way back through London. It's definitely worth a visit.

Back to the demo in Steyning. The venue: the music room of a very old house called St Mary's of Bramber. We Americans tend to have a pretty limited perspective of what "old" means and will ooh and aah at any structure built before the 20th century.

St Mary's was built in 1477. That's old, although to be fair, The Music Room is a later addition. In this gorgeous space, Kat and my friend Chad Stelly had set up an extraordinarily revealing system using Rockport Orion speakers driven by Nagra electronics with SME Model 6, Model 12, and Model 60 turntables ready to go.

First up was SME's most affordable turntable, the Model 6, followed by a midpoint, the Model 12, and finally the flagship Model 60, which I reviewed in the August 2023 issue. With each step, you could hear the expected improvements: improved dynamics, transparency, and scale. Normally, I would expect a system this revealing to expose the weaknesses of a turntable like the Model 6, but it held its ground well.

After two days immersed in the SME experience in Steyning, I was left with a strong impression that SME is building toward a strong future. I look forward to seeing and hearing what comes next.