Back in the early nineteen seventies, the main purveyors of turntables in Britain were Garrard and BSR, with the likes of Lenco, Dual, Philips, Collaro and Balfour also providing some popular designs. Many were auto-changers, and they were frequently featured in popular radiograms of the time; however, they were far from suitable for audiophile use. […]
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Since its introduction over half a century ago, many hundreds of thousands of Hadcocks have been sold in over a hundred countries, making it one of the most popular tonearms that most audiophiles have never heard of. It’s a traditional unipivot design – indeed, for its fans, it’s the classic unipivot – that predates more
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If, as LeCorbusier put it, “design is intelligence made visible,” then Roy Gandy, the Rega RB300’s designer, has a few extra brain cells. This tonearm is a seminal design that was initially introduced in the summer of 1983. Its tracking weight spring can be chastised for adding a tinge of hue. The RB250, on the
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The vintage Ultimo 10X, a high output moving coil built and manufactured by Dynavector of Japan, will be remembered by any analogue enthusiast worth his record collection. It was one of the most musical cheap pickups available in the late 1970s, with the added benefit of not requiring a pricey step up transformer. The problem
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As one might anticipate, the cartridge market in the late 1970s was thriving. This was the pinnacle of the vinyl craze, when the format was all-powerful and the only method to listen to high-quality stereo recordings. As you might expect, the market was broad, with cheap Goldring G850 moving magnets retailing for around £10 and
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To honor the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Johan Sebastian Bach’s death, Ortofon released three new Kontrapunkt moving coil cartridges at the turn of the millennium. The a and b comfortably outsold the c, despite the fact that they were all slightly different. The b was my favorite of the bunch, with a Nude
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It’s difficult to overstate the decline of Dual, which had once been one of Europe’s leading turntable manufacturers, employing over three thousand people across various factories in West Germany during the country’s postwar economic boom. It originated in 1907 in the Black Forest village of St. Georgen, when brothers Christian and Joseph Steidinger began creating
With a number of specialist tonearm producers, the United States was a thriving market for turntables. Rabco, based in Maryland, was one of these companies, selling its complicated SL-8 and SL-8E tangential-tracking tonearms from the late 1960s onwards. Powered by two small electric motors, they amassed a small but devoted following, prompting the company to
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The new Audio Technica AT-OC9X is the fourth iteration of this venerable moving coil in 32 years. Bonded Elliptical (AT-OC9XEB, £210), Nude Elliptical (AT-OC9XEN, £300), Microlinear (AT-OC9XML, £480), Shibata (AT-OC9XSH, £570), and Special Line Contact (AT-OC9XSL, £660) are among the stylus options. “When the first AT-OC9 series was introduced in 1987, it was an innovative
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After what seems like decades of waiting, Audio-Technica released a new cartridge line in 2017, with bodies in the 500, 600, and 700 Series and seven different styli kinds, including special line contact, Shibata, MicroLine, elliptical, and conical varieties. The playback of stereo, mono, and even 78 rpm shellac recordings is optimized in all versions.
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