Turntables are in and out of fashion. Many start off strong, but as time goes on, they deteriorate into mediocrity. Others, on the other hand, seem to persevere, and perhaps this is a measure of their greatness? Linn’s Sondek LP12, Technics’ SL-1200, SME’s Model 30, Garrard’s 301/401, Rega’s Planar 3 and, of course, Michell’s iconic […]
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The Michell GyroDec, which is now over thirty years old, has become a famous British vinyl classic. It was one of the first ‘skeletal’ designs, with a vestigial sandblasted aluminium chassis rather than a traditional hardwood plinth, when it was introduced in 1981. This, together with the five gold-plated brass weights dangling from the platter
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Meridian has been a leader in the field of innovation since its founding in 1977. Bob Stuart and Allen Boothroyd, the company’s founders, had already worked on some of the most innovative hi-fi devices of the 1970s, including the Lecson AC1/AP1 and the Orpheus. The M1 active loudspeaker was Meridian’s bold debut when they first
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The Lecson AC1/AP1 preamplifier/power amplifier combination was released in 1974, and it was one of the most remarkable pieces of industrial design the world had ever seen. Allen Boothroyd and Robert Stuart, the two men behind it, established themselves as one of the best design teams in British hi-fi history. The Meridian brand was introduced
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McIntosh is a prestigious brand with a long history of providing high-quality items. The massive MC275 power amplifier is in its sixth iteration, with the first one debuting in 1961. The famous McIntosh Unity Coupled Circuit, designed by company co-founders Sidney A. Corderman and Gordon Gow, featured an unique transformer to offer wider bandwidth with
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The Marantz SA-12S1 is a big one, at 458x126x379mm, and is often finished in the company’s signature champagne gold. Twelve professional-grade Crystal CS4397 DACs and twelve custom HDAM copper-plated op-amps were installed inside, all of which worked in dual differential mode. Marantz’s proprietary Super-Ring toroidal transformer, as well as a separate transformer for the fluorescent
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Japanese manufacturers were fighting tooth and nail in 1980 to provide the cleanest and most powerful transistor amplification yet developed. Marantz was solidly in the Class A camp with a series of new-fangled MOSFET power amps, but Sony and Yamaha had lately gone down the V-FET road (with the TA-N7B and B2, respectively) and Pioneer
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It shared much of its genetic make-up with a Philips machine – the CD303 – and was the top model in the company’s first generation range of CD players. To put it another way, its list of component parts reads like a wish list from a 1980s digiphile. The CDM-1 Pro mechanism, which has a
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The first Compact Disc players were released in 1982, and British purchasers received them a year later. This generation has mostly been forgotten since then, which is a shame because many of them sound considerably more ‘analogue’ than many of today’s high-end esoterica. A good example is the Marantz CD-54. It’s a late first-generation design
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When Compact Disc was first introduced in 1982, there was a lot of debate over how it sounded. There were two separate CD player tribes at first: Philips-based units and Japanese-based machines. The former had DACs that only went up to 14-bit resolution but oversampled the digital datastream four times, such as the Philips CD100.
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