Tonearm Reviews

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Ken Micallef  |  Apr 03, 2025  | 
In his review of the J.Sikora Initial turntable, Stereophile's resident artist/sage Herb Reichert wrote, "Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination."

When it comes to playing records, I too have a ritual. It involves carefully cleaning the vinyl, first on a Pro-Ject VC-33, followed by immersion in a HumminGuru Ultrasonic vinyl cleaner. Before and after, I inspect the record's grooves with a pricey VisibleDust Quasar R magnifier. Only then—black coffee hot, glasses cleaned, stylus brushed free of contaminants, notepad at hand—am I ready to receive the messages ingrained in a shiny black vinyl disc.

Michael Trei  |  Jan 29, 2025  | 
The British audio scene from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was pretty strange. Audio as a hobby was a big deal, with widespread appeal to a much younger crowd than today. Audiophiles were guided by a flurry of what my friends called "hi-fi pornos," audio magazines that filled the racks at the newsagents.

Far more than you see today, there was a strong nationalist bent, with some writers displaying an open bias against anything that wasn't British. Magazines' editorial departments presented readers with a clear, specific doctrine of how a system should be built and what components readers should acquire.

As a schoolboy with no system of my own, I lapped up these suggestions, and when I returned to the US in 1980 to attend university, I was finally able to start building a system that conformed to the system-building rules that had been drilled into me.

Ken Micallef  |  Jan 22, 2025  | 
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the MoFi Electronics MasterDeck turntable ($5995), as the brainchild of Allen Perkins in his role as MoFi's Chief Analog Designer, lies in the question of how his background as a jazz drummer has shaped his approach to turn table design. How does the rhythmic sensibility of a percussionist translate into the meticulous engineering of a turntable?

"It's a little complicated," Perkins wrote over email. "Being a drummer, I am sensitive to timing in music, so it makes me sensitive to problems. However, it does not provide any direction for solutions. It could be seen as an annoying awareness as a listener, like perfect pitch. In my case, it is an advantage because I love to solve problems, in general, so I persevere and have a built-in sense to assess what I've done."

Herb Reichert  |  Jan 01, 2025  | 
Like romance or car racing, the act of playing records is tactile by design. Like drifting through curves or making out, spinning vinyl is a learned skill that requires users to touch everything with practiced assurance.

To play a disc with Technics' new SL-1300G record player means pushing its round On button, then touching one or more of its rectangular speed selector buttons, then pushing the big square [Start:Stop] button, then unclamping the tonearm and using its cue lever to raise it up.

Next comes the part where my heart beats a little faster: using the headshell's fingerlift to position the arm over the disc and lower it into a groove.

When the needle contacts the groove, the whole system kicks in and sound comes out.

Ken Micallef  |  Dec 26, 2024  | 
In midsummer 2022, I reviewed the German-made Clearaudio Reference Jubilee turntable, a $30,000 vinyl virtuoso that played music with clear-headed realism, brain-opening transparency, and lifelike speed and dynamics. Its performance was nothing short of exhilarating. It was one of the top three turntables I had ever laid my ears upon.

Clearaudio's house sound, whether from the affordable to the mortgage-busting, is one of refinement, lucidity, clarity, precision, and quietness. Which brings us to the Clearaudio Signature turntable, a joint offering from Clearaudio GmbH and its US distributor, Musical Surroundings.

Michael Trei  |  Sep 26, 2024  | 
It started one evening when I was killing time watching YouTube videos and stumbled across a 2017 talk given by Jonathan Carr, Lyra's brilliant cartridge designer (footnote 1). After discussing his design and Lyra's manufacturing processes for about 18 minutes, Carr opens the floor to questions. Someone asks which of the many cartridge setup parameters he feels is the most important. I was floored when the first thing Carr said was that "horizontal tracking error is not very important at all." What? I couldn't believe I was hearing this from the guy who writes owner's manuals with super-specific specifications, like tracking force measured to a 100th of a gram and loading recommendations with wide but oddly specific ranges like 97.6 to 806 ohms. Did he really believe that the tonearm geometry calculations of Löfgren, Stevenson, et al, weren't such a big deal?

For decades I have painstakingly used the best tools available to perfect these settings with every cartridge I install; now a guy whose opinion I respect deeply is saying it's not very important.

Ken Micallef  |  Aug 15, 2024  | 
Modern turntables are a paradox. The ever-evolving technology beneath their sleek exteriors fascinates me. The high-end turntable market these days can feel less like a haven for music lovers and more like a brutalist arms race in pursuit of maximum audio extraction.

Yet, it's not all about performance. Many new 'tables are adorned with outlandish, purely cosmetic flourishes that cause me to chuckle. Some super-bling record players, with their jutting angles and industrial menace, evoke the chrome carcass of the Battlestar Galactica, a testament to mechanical might. Others are even more menacing, channeling the mirror-finish abyss of Darth Vader's helmet, gleaming with a promise of sonic domination—but is that an invitation or a threat?

Setting aside those cosmetic affectations, it's a war, and the enemy—well, the main enemy anyway—is vibrations, which may seem strange considering that vibrations are the whole point of the endeavor.

Michael Trei  |  Jun 05, 2024  | 
I sometimes joke about how audio designers create products that resemble themselves, not just in how they look, but also in the design approach used, and especially the way they sound. So, we have tall, cool, pragmatic Scandinavians making gear like the lean, elegant Børresen loudspeakers, while the Italians build luscious curvy equipment endowed with natural wood and leather, like Sonus Faber speakers and Unison Research amplifiers. Continuing this blatant stereotyping, we have Acoustic Signature founder Gunther Frohnhöfer, a stout German known for creating precision-built turntables that are as solid-looking as he is.

When I visited the Acoustic Signature factory in 2023, I watched as they hewed massive slabs of aluminum into beautiful, heavyweight turntables. This approach is the opposite of the lightweight-but-rigid philosophy embraced by Rega, and while the resulting performance has different strengths, I would argue that it is at least equally valid. As with Rega, Acoustic Signature products have a purposeful simplicity, in a way that would allow a nonaudiophile to instantly recognize what their function is.

Alex Halberstadt  |  May 22, 2024  | 
Photo by Michael Stephens

Last May, during a visit to High End Munich, I was ushered into an exhibitor's room with much ceremony. Other showgoers had been shooed out so that I, a reviewer at an important magazine, could listen to the hi-fi undisturbed. The room featured obelisk-shaped "statement" speakers, monoblocks with enough tubes to light a cafeteria, and a wedding cake–sized turntable, all connected with python-thick cables. The whole thing cost as much as a starter house in coastal Connecticut.

The room's proprietor asked me to choose from a small stack of LPs. I went for Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else, a wonderful Miles Davis record in all but name. I know it as well as any other piece of recorded music. When the system began to play, it was doing all the audiophile things expected of an expensive hi-fi. But while I recognized the notes, I struggled to recognize the music. Something was clearly, obviously amiss. The rhythmic emphases and stresses that convey music's meaning and emotion were landing in the wrong places.

Ken Micallef  |  Mar 21, 2024  | 
In the early 1980s, I worked in a pop band playing AM radio hits, grooving behind my Yamaha drums and Zildjian cymbals as sweat drenched my body and my ears rang. We danced. We pranced. My shiny silk jumpsuit led upwards to a 2"-high afro, which women ran fingers through in hopes of finding contraband smokes ... Then overnight, everything changed.

At the beginning of the previous decade, Technics had released the SP-10, the first direct drive turntable. That was followed in short order by the SL-1100. Clive Campbell, aka Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc, pioneered the simultaneous use of two Technics SL-1100s, initially at his sister's birthday party in the Bronx, inspiring "block parties" (rigging streetlamps for power) and hip-hop culture. Kool Herc isolated drumbeats from records by James Brown (with drummers Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks) and the Incredible Bongo Band (powered by master studio drummer Jim Gordon), among others, creating "breaks" for heated dance-floor partying. Soon, Lace Taylor (aka Afrika Bambaataa) and Grandmaster Flash (The Message) took Kool Herc's inventions into the mainstream, and hip-hop went global.

Michael Trei  |  Dec 06, 2023  | 
About four years ago, the stand-alone tonearm market went through a bit of a crisis. First, in December 2019, SME announced that it would stop selling tonearms separately, effective immediately. From that point on, SME tonearms would be available only in combination with SME turntables. . .

Five months later, in May 2020, we received the second blow in this double whammy of bad tonearm news. That's when the Ichikawa Jewel Company of Japan, maker of Jelco tonearms, announced without warning that they were shutting down operations, closing their doors for good. They blamed a combination of an aging workforce, worn-out tooling that needed to be replaced, and the coronavirus pandemic. . .

We lost two key players all at once, but it's not as if we suddenly had nowhere to turn for tonearms. Turntable manufacturers like Acoustic Signature, Clearaudio, Origin Live, Pro-Ject, Rega, and VPI all sell their tonearms separately . . . A number of smaller tonearm specialists have popped up in recent decades: Acoustical Systems, Graham, GrooveMaster, Kuzma, Reed, Schick, Schröder, and at the ultrahigh end, Swedish Analog Technologies. Now we can add Korf Audio to the list.

Herb Reichert  |  Oct 18, 2023  | 
If you've read any of my previous Dreams, you no doubt realize that I am an empiricist by trade—that I believe in the value of relaxed, mindful observation, especially if my solitary observances are independently corroborated by others. Whenever possible, I test my observations by getting either the Spin Doctor, the Audiophiliac, or my Russian neighbor to listen and tell me what they notice. If they notice the same things I noticed, independently, I relax. Corroboration is important because when I submit a review, I have an obligation to get it right. I need to be confident that readers, when they listen, will likely hear the same thing I heard, for themselves.
Michael Trei  |  Jul 20, 2023  | 
Creating a new flagship model is never an easy task for an audio company. A good designer will have already incorporated all his or her best ideas into the prior flagship. For a follow-up, you typically get a scaled-up version of what came before, incorporating the kind of improvements a bigger budget will allow.

SME's history is well-documented. The company started out, in 1946, as an engineering company for hire. In 1959, after a few years supplying parts for the scale modeling and various other high-tech industries, company founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman wanted a better tonearm for his personal use. He leveraged the capabilities of his small engineering company to create what eventually became the legendary 3009 and 3012 tonearms. The reputation of the new arms spread quickly, and from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, SME dominated the high-end tonearm market. SME's corporate slogan was The Best Pick-Up Arm in the World, and few people at the time would have challenged that claim.

Ken Micallef  |  Jun 01, 2023  | 
Founded in 1978, VPI Industries appears to be one of the most successful turntable manufacturers in the world—certainly in the US. The New Jersey–based company sells turntables, tonearms, cartridges, record clamps, plinths, record cleaning machines, and a phono preamp. But that's not all. The company offers VPI-branded pillows, candles, mugs, stickers, T-shirts, and a tell-all company history, 40 Years on the Record.

And talk about turntables! From the entry-level $1499 Cliffwood to the top-of-the-line $104,000 Vanquish (found under the website's "VPI Luxury" page, accompanied by the adage, "Settle for Nothing but Extravagant"), VPI is clearly and rightfully proud of its analog achievements.

Herb Reichert  |  May 31, 2023  | 
I wish that all who love LP playback as much as I do could hear a Thorens TD 124 or Garrard 301 or EMT 930 in their systems, but those products are subject to the vagaries of supply and demand: They are rare and pricey.—Art Dudley

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