Tonearm Reviews

The late Jonathan Tinn of Blue Light Audio, importer of darTZeel electronics and a partner in Playback Designs with DSD expert Andreas Koch, loved vinyl. He approached Wave Kinetics' Matt Schuster and proposed that they together produce a turntable. Matt Schuster came up with the Wave Kinetics NVS Reference turntable ($45,000).

Allen Perkins's Spiral Groove SG1.1 turntable ($25,000) is a remarkably dense, compact, belt-driven design that weighs a surprising 75lb. With the motor isolated inside its 18.5" wide by 15" deep plinth, the SG1.1 has a small footprint, and its height of ca 5", including feet, permits a flexibility of placement seldom found with premium-priced turntables.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply that I'm a turntable setter upper. That seems to me like it should be descriptive enough, but it typically results in follow-up questions that have me explaining a whole audiophile subculture that few nonaudiophiles even realize exists.

In the high-end audio industry, the representation of women in professional roles is strikingly low. Yet these women are integral to every facet of the industry, from engineering and design to leadership, proving that their contributions are vital.

There are incredible values in audio, and then there are incredible values. The ones that deserve italics are those like Pioneer's SP-FS52 floorstanding speaker, designed by TAD's Andrew Jones and recently reviewed.

A friend who sells high-end audio gear once pointed out that people who shop for separate tonearms are very different from those interested in phono cartridges or turntables in general. If you think about it, this makes sense. Almost everyone buying a new turntable needs a cartridge to go with it, and most turntables come equipped with a tonearm. Tonearm shoppers are more avid enthusiasts than general consumers.

It wasn't always that way. In earlier days of high fidelity, 60 or more years ago, people putting together a cutting-edge phono playback system would typically buy what was known as a motor unit: a Thorens TD 124, Garrard 301, or a few years later the Garrard 401 or Technics SP-10. They would match it up with a tonearm from a company like SME or Ortofon.

The first commandment for a Stereophile reporter is to remain neutral about any product under review. But when a company has a history of making things you like, that isn't always easy to do.

Reviewing the VPI Avenger Direct turntable with its 12" FatBoy tonearm, I concluded, "The Avenger Direct recasts records I thought I knew well, revealing secrets and expressing a purer sense of each one's interior life." Covering the VPI Scout 21 for Stereophile's sister website, AnalogPlanet in October 2024, I wrote, "this $3300 table seriously swung and played it all warm and toasty, displaying a big heart. I would even say it displayed an inherent love of music, reflected in its wide rhythmic gait and warmhearted embrace of the LPs I spun on it. The 21 'table is quite the fine fit in the VPI sound family."

Despite my scarcely contained enthusiasm for these previous VPI products, I promise an unvarnished take on the Forever Model One turntable ($5250), which builds on one of the company's long-ago bestsellers, the HW-19, which was first produced in the early 1980s.