Turntable Reviews

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.

To watch as Rega very slowly expands its turntable offerings upmarket requires the patience of a Thomas Pynchon addict waiting for each new tome from the notoriously slow-working and reclusive author. Starting out 51 years ago with just one turntable model, Rega now offers turntables at seven different price levels, plus a few minor variations in between. During the "lost years" of waning turntable and vinyl sales in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rega boss Roy Gandy candidly admits that the company put little effort into advancing its turntable designs, as sales at the time didn't really justify the investment. Rega had shifted its focus to digital source components, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, and even introduced a tube CD player.

That momentum finally started to reverse about 15 years ago, as the vinyl revival started to kick in and turntable sales began to pick up again. By this point, Rega was a much larger company and was able to leverage its growing reputation to engage with cutting-edge high-tech manufacturing subcontractors. Through these new relationships, they created a test bed turntable called the Naiad that would extend their design philosophies as far as was feasibly possible...

The Naiad's high price was the result of some of the design choices that had already been made, when scaling up for production wasn't even under consideration. Rega knew it wouldn't be too difficult to create a more production-ready version, into which they could distill most of what they had learned from building the Naiad. The result is the Naia, where with just a few simple changes, they have managed to undercut the Naiad's price by more than 70%, down to $12,995.

It doesn't happen very often, but every once in a while a new turntable comes to my attention that I have no prior knowledge of. The last new turntable company that was a complete blank slate was J.Sikora, which I first encountered about six years ago courtesy of importer Jeff Fox of Notable Audio.

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.

Forty years ago, when I was a much younger man, I was a strong dude. I recall one day in 1986, soon after I started working at Sound by Singer, when Krell cofounder Dan D'Agostino drove down from his factory in Connecticut to deliver a load of amplifiers and preamps for us to sell. As the new guy, I was expected to do the grunt work.

The largest regularly scheduled choral singing event in the world is the Estonian National Song Festival, or Laulupidu, which comes around about once every five years in Tallinn, Estonia's capital city. The numbers are pretty mind blowing.

Making a turntable's platter spin at exactly 33¹/₃ rotations per minute sounds like it should be an easy task, but in fact it's hard to do precisely. Just getting the platter to turn is easy enough, but there are two forces trying to stop the platter that you need to overcome: friction from the bearing that supports the platter, and friction from the stylus riding in the groove.

I have found that turntable designers typically fall into one of two camps. First are what I call the obsessive machinists. These are the people with impressive manufacturing chops and a sharp eye for fine detail and precision. For them, making a better turntable usually involves taking what we already know and simply doing it better.

Whether it's a thicker chassis, more powerful motor, more precise bearing, more effective isolation system, or something else, the emphasis is always on stepping things up a notch or two, rather than reinventing the wheel. This obsession can result in some impressive 'tables—some of the most impressive in the world, with awesome attention to detail. But are they the best sounding?

The other camp is what I call the deep thinkers. They approach the task of playing a record from a theoretical perspective and leverage their knowledge of physics to come up with fresh and innovative designs. The results may look unconventional, or even odd at first glance, but when such lateral thinking clicks, it can really push the boundaries of what's possible.