Michael Trei

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.

Morris had been the de facto leader of my high school punk band, The Ripchords. Six years later, he was getting started with a career as ambient chill-out deejay Mixmaster Morris, releasing records as The Irresistible Force. Our apartment became a kind of hub in the South London music scene, with musicians and industry people circling through. Eventually, I found a job working at Music and Video Exchange, the gear-focused branch of the popular Record and Tape Exchange chain of secondhand record shops. At M&VE, the staff had first dibs on any cool gear that came in, and I remember being intensely envious when colleague Andy snagged a rare EMS VCS 3 synthesizer for almost nothing.

Now I find myself in that position again, with UK-based Connected-Fidelity and their turntable the TT Hub. Until I read the press release last December, sent to me by Mike Fajen of importer/distributor Sierra Sound, I was completely in the dark about the TT Hub, its manufacturer Connected-Fidelity, and that company's owner and head designer Michael Osborn.

After entering the store and browsing for a few minutes, I mustered up sufficient courage to head to the counter with the second Zeppelin LP and ask to listen to it. All was musical bliss for a few minutes. Then just as I was really getting into it, about halfway through "What Is and What Should Never Be," the clerk decided I'd heard enough and rudely interrupted my listening session with a "get lost kid" look on his face. I surprised him by pulling out my lawn-mowing cash and buying the album. I pedaled home furiously, as fast as I could, and slapped my first LP onto the family Garrard Autoslim, which I wrote about in Spin Doctor #11.

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.

But occasionally, Audio-Technica likes to show off its technological chops by launching a cartridge that breaks new ground. Last year, they celebrated their 60th anniversary by stunning everyone with the AT-MC2022, which uses an outrageous integrated stylus and cantilever fashioned from a single piece of lab-grown diamond. In 2016, they flexed their capabilities with the AT-ART1000, which completely reconfigured how the elements of a moving coil cartridge are arranged, with spectacular results.

Now, eight years after the AT-ART1000 was launched, A-T has introduced the AT-ART1000x, which incorporates several small but important improvements.

I can't honestly say I remember many details about my life between the ages of three and a half and seven, yet apparently some of that Swedish way of thinking ended up influencing my life view, specifically, how Swedes approach consumer goods and purchasing decisions.