Small job, big impact

A tonearm bearing has one of the smallest jobs in a hi-fi system and yet, one of the most consequential. It has to let the arm pivot freely while the cartridge reads movements measured in microns at 2-4 tonnes of pressure, up to 40,000 times a second. Get it seriously wrong and everything downstream is compromised: timing, tracking, dynamics, imaging, the lot.

After forty years of building, modifying, and rewiring just about every arm on the market, we’ve had a lot of experience with all sorts of bearings up close, as well as discussing many bearing systems with their designers face to face at hifi shows. We’ve compiled our thoughts on different tonearm bearings below.

What a bearing has to do

Four requirements, in tension with each other. Every design is a compromise between them.

Low friction. Records are rarely perfectly centred, so the arm tracks in and out continuously as the platter rotates. Beyond that, the groove itself demands free movement up and down from the tonearm to allow the cartridge to stay central in the groove, as it tracks a 3-dimensional, modulated waveform in much the same way a mogul skier might traverse a mogul field.  A high-friction bearing can’t keep up with the demands of this movement, resulting in smeared transients in your music. The stylus drags against the groove instead of riding it, sidewall pressure rises, and record wear accelerates.

Friction: Stiction. Stiction is a type of friction that is another fundamentally important part of tonearm bearing design. Like friction, stiction relates to freedom of movement,  namely, peak static friction. This is the force required to initiate movement between two stationary objects; here, it is how easily the tonearm, mounted with a cartridge, allows the bearings to move as the vinyl plays. It is crucial in the tonearm to have low-stiction bearings which can easily move and react to dynamic passages in the music pressed on your vinyl. The highest stiction means the tonearm gets… stuck. High-stiction bearings move very sluggishly and cause tracking errors with the cartridge. Even if it’s not heard in skipping or channel imbalances, high-stiction bearings limit the cartridge’s free movement and tracking. This limits the overall system’s fidelity and damages transients in every respect. Low stiction allows for a fast reaction to dynamics and transitions, benefiting all aspects of the music. The lower the stiction, the better; the higher the stiction? expect to be hearing smearing.

Rigidity. This sounds like a contradiction with low friction, but it isn’t. The bearing should rotate freely around its intended axes and resist everything else. We’re talking about play measured in microns, which sounds trivial until you remember the scale of what the cartridge is tracking and how it amplifies those movements by a factor of thousands. A bearing with even slight backwards-and-forward play introduces shockwaves into the arm every time the stylus hits a transient. This can be improved by adding mass in the right areas and by using some engineering know-how to determine where and how the pivots are placed.

Energy transfer. All tonearms vibrate, at some level. A key task is getting vibration in the arm to leave and, importantly, not to reflect back. The bearing is one of the main exit routes, and also a potential entry point for vibration from the turntable. So which matters more? In an ideal world, you’d want a joint that lets energy flow in one direction but not the other. Some designers will tell you that’s impossible. We disagree: bearings genuinely exhibit asymmetric behaviour depending on their design and geometry, and the right balance depends on the rest of the system. A well-isolated turntable lets you prioritise extracting energy from the arm. A noisier deck pushes you toward keeping energy from getting in.

Reliability. A well-built tonearm should last fifty years or more. We still see arms we built three decades ago performing as they did the day they shipped. Unreliability can creep in through poor-quality components or sloppy assembly, causing components to drift out of alignment over time or fail altogether.

The main families

Gimbal bearings: small ball races on perpendicular axles, the type used in skateboards and countless other applications. Most of the industry uses them. We do too, across our entry-level models, because when they’re done properly, they work very well. The catch is “done properly”: ball size, steel grade, cage design, race smoothness, and tolerance class all matter, and they all sound different. Ball bearings can be high-stiction and harder to move. This is why we specify our own bearings rather than buying them off the shelf, to ensure they are not overly tight and the stiction stays as low as possible. 

One detail worth mentioning: where the gimbal sits matters as much as how it’s built. Rega’s arms place the bearings inside the arm tube. When we started modifying Rega tonearms in the eighties, the single most effective change we made was relocating the bearings into the yoke, outside the tube. Bearings vibrate. You don’t want that vibration happening inside the part of the arm carrying the signal.

Uni-pivot bearings: a single spike resting in a cup. Beautifully simple, cheap to manufacture, and inherently low-friction and low-stiction. It dominates the budget end of the high-performance market for good reason. The downsides are real, though: the spike is vulnerable to damage, and a single point can’t constrain rotation around the arm’s own axis, so designers compensate by hanging the counterweight well below the pivot, or in the worst cases, using high-friction cones to stabilise the pivot. Setup is notoriously fiddly, and this bearing type cannot remain stable in the azimuth plane, 

There’s a clever variant where the spike locates against three small ball bearings instead of a flat cup floor. Friction increases, but rigidity improves dramatically, and vibration is transmitted out of the arm more effectively. Whether the trade is worth it depends on what you value.

A recent breakthrough in this area has been the SUPATRAC tonearm, which uses a sideways unipivot, meaning the arm’s pivot is locked against the drag of the groove, and cannot shift backwards and forwards during playback. It’s an ingenious design by an ingenious designer and friend. For the SUPATRAC philosophy, it is a coherent design. To achieve our own design goals, however, we employ a dual-pivot bearing.

Dual pivot bearings: What we use across our premium and high-end tonearm ranges. Two points into two cups, either side of the armtube handle vertical movement; conventional gimbals on the same plate handle horizontal rotation. You get the low-friction energy-transfer characteristics of point contact on the vertical axis, the stability and easy setup of gimbals on the horizontal, and adjustable azimuth as a bonus. The other interesting thing about this bearing type is the ability to mass load the pivot and add inertia to all axess.

Is the hybrid a compromise? Deliberately so. No single bearing type wins on all four requirements. A well-executed ball race outperforms a poor uni-pivot; a well-executed uni-pivot outperforms a mediocre ball race. Combining them lets each do what it does best.

Interestingly, three manufacturers in Europe: Kuzma, Moerch and Origin Live, independently arrived at the dual-pivot idea around 15 years ago. Nobody copied anyone. The bearing system just makes sense once you’ve spent enough time with the alternatives.

The exotic options, briefly

Ferrofluid-floated bearings: The arm floats on a bed of magnetic fluid, supposedly decoupling it from the arm board. The decoupling claim doesn’t really hold up. magnetic fluids, magnetic fields, air, and string all transmit vibration. Everything does, to some degree. There are no isolation barriers in this world, only better and worse compromises. This entails a fundamental lack of rigidity that prevents proper tracking of the record groove.

Hanging-thread bearings. The Schröder approach: the arm hangs from a high-tensile thread, sometimes with a paddle dipped in ferrofluid for damping. Genuinely ingenious, excellent freedom of movement. The practical challenge is controlling sway during cueing. Clearaudio’s variant uses a small magnet beneath the arm to stabilise it.

Magnetic bearings. The arm is held between opposing magnets, with nothing solid contacting it. Zero mechanical friction in the bearing itself, but that just throws the spotlight on a point most people miss:

On a well-designed gimbal arm, the arm cable accounts for roughly 70% of the total friction in the bearing system. The bearings themselves are a minority of the horizontal torque problem.

That figure changes how you think about everything. It’s why cable routing matters as much as bearing choice. We hold the cable hole in our yokes to 2mm; even 3mm measurably increases friction, because the cable starts to wander off-axis and create leverage on rotation. It’s also why we route the cable internally. An external run picks up RF, and we’ve measured radio interference even with as little as 4 inches of unshielded cable. 

Air bearings. Almost exclusively used on linear-tracking arms. They elegantly solve the tracking-error problem, but linear trackers have inherent issues: the effective mass is high because the entire assembly has to translate sideways, not just pivot. Some well-known designs run at 70g effective mass, which has uncomfortable implications for long-term record wear. A reasonable target is 25–30g — achievable, but the rest of the engineering is hard.

One of the larger issues here is keeping the air pressure genuinely constant and captive. Most air bearing designs have open sides that leak air pressure and allow horizontal play. Another issue here is how the cabling and air hose interact with the moving assembly – these are likely to introduce unwanted forces in the horizontal plane. 

Flex bearings. A thin, flexible membrane that bends rather than pivots. The advantage is the elimination of stiction: the slight extra friction required to get a stationary bearing moving. The trade-off is rigidity: to flex easily, the membrane has to be thin, and that thinness also allows vibration in both directions.

What to avoid

A short list of bearings we’d steer clear of as a buyer:

• Horizontal-point bearings (two spikes pointing outward from the arm tube into cups). The assembly pressure required to keep the spikes located feeds vibration straight into the tube. We’ve tried it. It sounds poor.
• Knife bearings (a knife edge in a V-groove). Effectively obsolete. Reliable forever, but the contact area is enormous, and it fails on three of the four requirements simultaneously.
• Ferrofluid-decoupled bearings, for the reasons above.

For everyone else, a general principle: if you don’t want to spend setup time fussing with azimuth and balance, a well-made conventional gimbal is the most user-friendly bearing of the lot. There’s no shame in that; it’s part of why gimbals remain on so much of our range.

In terms of absolute performance, we believe Dual-Pivot excels in all of the listed areas, which is why you’ll find them on the premium and high-end side of our range. 

The point

Bearings, like every other element of tonearm design, are about execution. There is no single “best” type. What matters is how well the chosen approach is realised: bearing quality, placement, cable management, and the mass & rigidity of everything around it. The job isn’t to chase a theoretical ideal off the track; it’s to understand the compromises clearly enough to find the best solution, and the other design opportunities that bearing allows.

A customer phoned us recently

He’d asked his local dealer whether to upgrade his tonearm. The reply: ” Don’t bother, it won’t make any difference.”

We understand why a dealer might say that. Look at the stylus tracing the groove. A needle moving 20,000 times a second, sometimes 40,000 on the best cartridges, withstanding around a thousand G of force. The conclusion seems obvious. The cartridge is doing the work. Everything else just holds it in place.

But this conclusion is wrong. The gap between what most people believe about tonearms and what actually drives sound quality is why we’ve spent nearly 40 years designing them.

A demonstration in front of 130 engineers

A while back, we presented a lecture to the Institute of Engineering and Technology, a sceptical crowd by nature. To make the point about where performance actually comes from, we set up two systems side by side.

System one: an Origin Live Calypso turntable and Illustrious tonearm with one of our tonearms, around £3,500 at the time of demo, fitted with a £400 cartridge.

System two: an entry-level Pro-ject Juke Box £200 turntable/tonearm combo fitted with the Lyra Atlas, an £8,000 reference cartridge.

Same record, same downstream electronics. The room was unanimous. The cheaper cartridge in a better tonearm and turntable sounded substantially better.

This isn’t an argument against good cartridges. The Atlas is a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s an argument about where in the vinyl playback chain your money does the most work.

The scale problem

To understand why, you have to grasp the scale at which a stylus operates, and how easily it can be interfered with.

A record groove is roughly 40 microns across, about the thickness of a human hair. Within that groove, the stylus is detecting movements as small as a micron at frequencies up to 40 kHz. The signal it produces is then amplified roughly 8,000 times before reaching your speakers.

A useful way to visualise this: imagine placing a supermarket carrier bag on top of Mount Everest, then magnifying the bag until it’s the size of the mountain. Any tiny crease, any minor imperfection in the bag is now reproduced at the scale of an entire geological feature.

That’s the amplification factor your tonearm operates inside. Any vibration, any flex, any unwanted movement the tonearm contributes gets magnified by the same 8,000 times the music does.

The cartridge should theoretically be able to produce a perfect transcription of the groove, but that is never the case. every unwanted vibration, whether that’s in the tube, the friction of the bearing or an unstable application of side bias produces vibration that interferes with the cartridge and the signal it is generating. This in turn results in smearing in the music you listen to.

Arm tubes as they vibrate and resonate, actually flex and move, which is bad news for the accurate tracking of a groove. Think about it this way:

The clock gauge on a fishing rod

In engineering we use a clock gauge, an instrument that measures distance in microns. Mounted on the most rigid mechanism it gives precise, repeatable readings.  In contrast mounting that gauge on the end of a fishing rod the readings become meaningless, because the fishing rod is too flexible. The gauge is still accurate. The reference point isn’t stable, and heres the kicker: in the worst case scenario, if the rod flexes and the in opposition to where the guage needs to be, the reading is zero.

A stylus is a mechanical instrument. The tonearm holds it steady. If the arm flexes, twists, or vibrates while the stylus reads the groove, the cartridge can’t tell which movements came from the record and which came from the arm. The signal is contaminated before it ever leaves the cartridge.

This is why rigidity is the first principle of tonearm design. When the stylus hits a sharp transient like the leading edge of a bass note, that energy tries to push the whole arm backwards. If the arm flexes even slightly, energy that should have become signal becomes flex, and you lose dynamics. Bass disappears first.

Resonance: the wrong measurement

Magazines often quote a tonearm’s resonant frequency, with an ideal around 10 Hz. The implication is that an arm with the “right” frequency is a good arm. This misses the more important measurement.

Every tonearm resonates. It’s a spectrum, but no material is genuinely rigid at this scale, not titanium, not carbon fibre, not the densest hardwood. The question isn’t whether your arm resonates. It’s how much it moves when it does.

Theoretically, an arm perfectly resonating would actually stay still  at its ends – in perfect resonance, no matter what the frequency, the cartridge would remain still. Of course, this isn’t how things work in practice, but the important thing to note is that resonance itself isn’t the issue. what matters is how great the amplitude reaching the position of your cartridge is.

We’d rather have an arm that resonates at an “imperfect” frequency but moves only a tiny amount, than one with a textbook 10 Hz resonance that flexes by a larger amplitude. The frequency is what reviewers measure. The amplitude is what your cartridge actually has to cope with.

Where the energy goes

When the stylus excites the arm, vibration travels down the tube toward the bearings and the counterweight. Most of it hits the counterweight at the back, and because the counterweight is heavy, some of that energy reflects straight back up the tube into the cartridge. The cartridge is trying to hold itself steady to read the groove. A reflected wave through its mount fights that effort and smears the signal.

The conventional fix is a single solid weight on the rear stub. We do something different. On our high-end arms from Illustrious up, we not only use a hollow mass-effective rear sleeve, but our counterweights are built from multiple layers of dissimilar materials, designed to absorb rather than reflect. Our current design uses 22 separate components and took years to develop. Multi-layer counterweights are now appearing on competing arms, usually a sign that an approach is working.

The materials trade-off

There is no perfect tonearm material. Titanium is rigid but rings at higher frequencies, giving beautiful midrange and treble but weak bass. Soft cast aluminium, used in many entry-level arms, rolls off the top end and loses dynamics. Carbon fibre is genuinely good and currently fashionable, but treated as a single-material solution, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

That problem is this: rigidity and damping fight each other. You want the arm rigid enough that the stylus reads cleanly. You also want it to dissipate vibrational energy quickly, so reflections don’t return to the cartridge. Add too much damping, and you lose some frequencies while others travel through and reflect back at different times, creating a timing smear you can hear in the music.

After thirty-plus years of experimentation, our conclusion is that no single material does it all. Our current arms use combinations of multi-layer tube construction, specialist coatings, and internal damping, because each frequency band responds best to a different solution. There is no magic material, only careful trade-offs handled at every level of the structure.

What this means for your system

The cartridge is not where most of the audible difference in vinyl playback lives. The tonearm and turntable are. If you’re upgrading a system and your budget is finite, the tonearm is almost always where the next pound is best spent. It’s the unfashionable answer, but its the honest one.

Are Transients the Real Case for Vinyl?

Not Just a Collector’s item.

This may annoy you. It’s either well-trodden ground or simply tone-deaf; after all, does a case for vinyl need to be made when it’s currently the highest-grossing format on the market?

But this is not a case for vinyl as physical media, which is burdened with tropes about tactility, collectability, and offline sentiment. As great as those things are, this is a case for vinyl’s superiority with respect to its transients, and that is probably what will annoy vinyl critics the most. 

So, apologies for what is to ensue as I hitch up my waders and get into the longest-running debate in audiophile history: analogue vs digital.

Coming to Terms

If you’ve described vinyl’s appeal as “warmth,” you may have fallen into a common trap. Media often uses “warmth” as a catch-all explanation for vinyl’s resurgence. It hints at a difference between analogue and digital without explaining what that difference really is.

That’s understandable. Most people rarely experience a decent vinyl system, let alone compare it directly to digital.

Can we expect casual observers of the vinyl revival to dig deeper? “Warmth” is valid, but it’s only the surface. In my view, it’s not even the most important or convincing factor, since it’s often poo-pooed by vinyl critics as distortion.

Despite booming sales, many buyers still need convincing to actually play the records they purchase. If we want analogue to thrive long-term, we need to explain vinyl’s benefits more clearly and precisely. So let’s talk about the crucial term here: Transients.

Transients

This case is about transients. There are many other aspects of sound to be claimed by the digital or vinyl camps. But when it comes to transients, I am firmly planting the flag in the analogue territories. 

To qualify, this isn’t about whether you can digitally model an analogue signal and its transients. You can. But perfect computer modelling and real-world playback are different things. So Shannon and Nyquist be damned, this is an argument that analogue creates an audio signal more efficiently, with less corruption, resulting in audible differences in transients.

For those new to the game, a transient is a short-duration, high-amplitude burst of energy occurring at the very beginning of a sound waveform. It represents the initial “impact” or attack—such as a drum hit, guitar pick, or vocal consonant—before the sound settles into its sustained phase. Transients are crucial for perceived punch, definition, and rhythm, but a lot more on that to come..

When Vinyl Sounds Better.

Walking around Hi-Fi shows, visiting dealerships, and in my own system (and friends’), one difference always stands out between analogue and digital: analogue’s superior soundstaging.

Soundstaging is how the various elements of the music present themselves in a 3-dimensional space. We use the terms ‘sound stage’, ‘stereo image’, or ‘imaging’ to refer to the sonic presentation of height, width, and depth, and the position of sounds in that space. 

Vinyl systems deliver a greater sense of 3-dimensionality, especially in the depth of different elements of the sound, while digital presentations are closer to a 2-dimensional left-to-right pan. This stems from how transients are handled.

Digital lovers, why trust me, a chip in the game vinyl evangelist? Hear the argument from your own side:

In a 2024 Munich High End interview with John Darko, Chord Electronics digital consultant Rob Watts said of his M Scaler products:

“The big problem with digital is the timing of transients” 

Now, to begin to understand what Watts is saying here, we first need to understand exactly what transients are.

What are Transients?

Transients refer to the initial rise and peak of a sound wave. This is the sound of the strike of a cymbal before the note sustains and decays. These are the consonants or emphasised vowels in the words of a vocal.

These are even the enunciated parts of a word that make it make sense. “I’ve got you under my skin” without its transients would sound something like: “i’e oh oo uner ay ih”. The sound no longer makes sense; everything is slurred and can’t convey the line’s meaning. 

In the same sense, a drum snare would no longer sound like a snare, or a guitar like a guitar, maybe uncanny psychedelic ones at best. And uncanny is a good term here, because without the transients, the phrase is unable to sound natural or real. 

All music has transients, so even Aphex Twin’s otherworldly ambient techno masterpiece ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ would lose its airiness, its sense of beat, texture, and space without some level of transients during playback.

In a stereo mix, several instruments and or vocals are combined, each delivering their own transients that rise and peak in the music. But transient’s dont just control attack, and don’t just make things sound accurate, they also control the space and time of the soundstage.  Watts explains this well: 

“Transients are used by the brain so that we can perceive instruments as separate entities, locating those instruments in space, the timbre and pitch.”

So transients control our understanding and recognition of different words, and notes delivered by voices and instruments. As part of a waveform travelling at different speeds and amplitudes, they also control how we perceive space in the music, as well as any sense of timing, and the dynamic range.

How This Relates to Hi-Fi

The speed, efficiency, and control with which the playback system creates and delivers transients determine how you experience the dimensionality of your music. 

Personally, I’m more engaged when things sound more three-dimensional, “In the room” and expansive in all directions. 

The Problem with Digtial Transients

Watts assesses digital audio with refreshing, if not brutal, honesty: 

“The big problem with the current digital is the timing of transients, and when you put the digital signal into an interpolation filter, and every single DAC on the planet has got an interpolation filter, the timing of transients is all wrong. They’re shifting backwards and forwards continuously, and this shifting backwards and forwards of the timing of transients confuses the brain, and as a result, your instruments lack separation, you don’t get timbre variation, and you can’t locate instruments in space’ 

Watt’s is revealing all of this of course, because the Quintet M Scaler is his, and Chord Electronics solution to this problem. But taking that aside, one of the keys to the argument for vinyl was in his next answer in the Darko interview. John asks Rob: Why is the Quintet able to do this and not the Dave? (the model below) Watts replies that the reason the Quintet can deliver improved transients is:

“Simply because of the amount of processing power. The more processing power you’ve got delivers much better sound quality because you can more accurately reconstruct the timing of transients. If you wanted to perfectly reconstruct the original timing, you would need an infinite amount of processing.”

 Watts goes on to say that the algorithm used to reconstruct perfect transients is more important even than the infinite processing power required. The total development time for the proprietary coding in the Quartet took 6 years of development.

With digital, better transients are beginning to be delivered by using large amounts of power to process the digital source through an extremely complicated algorithm to enhance the digital signal. Watts’ endeavour is remarkable, innovative, and to be applauded.

The Case for Vinyl

Vinyl contrasts sharply: no conversion needed. No DAC, no interpolation filter, no timing corruption from digital processing.

Digital requires huge amounts of electricity for that processing. Here’s something we can all agree on: Mains power is noisy, so designers obsess over power supplies to reduce interference that blurs transients. It only takes a bit of time spent with an oscilloscope to see the evidence for yourself. Even batteries carry inherent noise.

Vinyl’s signal? Mechanically generated at full resolution. No electrical power required to create it

Digital playback takes electricity; vinyl playback makes electricity.

Your Cartridge Generates Brand New Electricity.

The cantilever attached to your stylus moves a magnet in coils (MM) or coils in magnets (MC), inducing current via electromagnetic induction. The cartridge is a tiny generator creating fresh electrical signal—left and right channels—without any prior power input.

Only after the tonearm wires does the signal hit its first electrical stage: the phono stage’s RIAA EQ, done with simple analogue electronics. No digital-to-analogue conversion, no upsampling, no special transient processing.

The cartridge is a transducer: mechanical energy → electrical energy. The tonearm has no power supply, no mains dependence. It delivers a raw analogue waveform.

Vinyl needs negligible power for EQ in the phono stage—but nothing to “enhance” or correct transients. Good analogue playback lets transients flow untampered from the source.

Interference with the source in vinyl systems is mostly mechanical (hence the need for premium gear), not electrical mains noise.

This is why good analogue playback is able to deliver such effective transients. In contrast to the slightly confused transients that Watts describes as endemic to basically all DACs on the market, the analogue signal delivers transients untampered straight from the source material. There is essentially no electrical interference of the kind faced by the rest of the mains taking system.

Sound of the police

I’m sure the measurements police will be after me for this one, with some kind of number that points to digital superiority. What’s more, I have no measurable data to provide you with. I can only point to the facts regarding electricity, and talk about the subjective experience I have after decades of being raised in the industry, of experiences in our listening room comparing CD to vinyl, streaming to Vinyl, and high-res to Vinyl.

I hear the same thing at every Hi-Fi Show I go to yearly in my job role, and every dealership I’ve visited who have been willing to make the comparison. For the digital crowd, this is unlikely to be enough. You’ll likely think I have probably developed some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, having been indoctrinated into vinyl from birth.

I’ll point out again that Rob Watts himself is the one pointing to a weakness in digital. Weakness in contrast to what? In contrast to an analogue signal. Without an analogue signal, we probably wouldn’t even know that depth could be such a sublime part of stereo playback, or just how good separation and soundstaging can get. And it’s not just Watts either. There are many developers in the industry who unexpectedly favour analogue, but wouldn’t make such comments on the record. 

Rob Watts makes the case that more attention needs to be directed to the handling of the waveform itself for advancements in digital, rather than resting on the laurels of measurable figures (that may be quite irrelevant to an analogue signal). We listen to sound waves, not numbers. Every employed speaker designer will tell you that numbers always supplement listening. Be brave enough to listen with your ears and consider what a real musician, band, or orchestra in 3-dimensional space would sound like. If you need a reference point, heck, maybe get out of the listening room and attend a concert.

Not all vinyl beats digital. A Crosley is enough to dispel that idea. And this isn’t the case to say only listen to vinyl. There’s fantastic music only available digitally, and there’s fantastic music only on vinyl. Some of my favourite music is poorly mastered and pressed to vinyl. Some of the music I discover listening digitally sounds far better on vinyl. 

Nor is it the case that even all high-end vinyl playback sounds better than digital. Some eyewateringly expensive vinyl systems had some of the driest sounds I heard at Munich last year, and I promise you it wasn’t down to room treatment. But even in those cases, the delivery of the transients still had that signature separation and 3-dimensionality that lies squarely in the ownership of vinyl. Better vinyl systems at the Munich show presented listeners not only with the transients we’ve discussed, but also rich tonal quality and pinpoint timing. The ‘just right’ that vinyl-loving Oldilocks would recognise, and newcomers are trying to understand.

Older readers please take that as a compliment. At 30 almost everyone in the Hi-Fi industry is older than me. It takes the openness of a Rob Watts for me to articulate what I hear in a vinyl system compared to a digital one, to begin to understand what transients are, and to think it through. 

If there’s one takeaway from this, let’s be more open-handed with our knowledge. Many older Hi-Fi aficionados have helped me to understand our terms and concepts in Hi-Fi, in its design and its playback. Conversations that clearly explain what Hi-Fi terminology means help to draw attention to what is happening when we listen. That is crucial for my generation’s understanding of the industry, and equally so, its ability to thrive for years to come.

Thanks for reading. 

– David Baker

Sovereign Turntable: ‘It’s Like Having a New Album‘

Listening to the Sovereign Turntable, two seasoned audiophiles, David Price & Mike Evans (who have heard countless high-end turntables), agree: “It’s like hearing a track for the first time”. When such high praise comes from a long-standing editor, and long-time retailer alike, you know they’re talking about a truly special product. The effect isn’t just limited to our super high-end decks either, and many customers echo the same sentiments about the breathtaking performances of Turntables and arms much lower in our range. When I read equipment reviews, I usually like to know a little about who is conducting the review because it helps to know a specific reviewers’ tastes and whether they are trustworthy. For those of you who may not know David Price, it may help to say that he is one of the most respected Hi-Fi reviewers in the industry. Currently the editor-in-chief of Stereonet, he has also been the editor of Hi-Fi World for a decade. He conducted many of the group comparison tests in Hi-Fi Choice for years and, to this day, is a regular contributor to both Hi-Fi Choice and News. Mike Evans has experience retailing Hi-Fi and contributing to Stereonet UK. Recently, David and Mike have been sitting down to discuss all things audio on Hi-Fi Riff, which is a YouTube channel run by the pair. In one of their recent episodes, they extolled the virtues of the Sovereign-S Turntable and Agile Tonearm. Listen to their thoughts on Origin Live, founder Mark Baker, and most importantly, experiencing vinyl playback like never before.

Video Below: Watch David Price and Mike Evans of Hi-Fi Riff on the Sovereign-S & Agile

Transcript Highlights:

Mike Evans on hearing Synchronicity on the Sovereign: “We’ve been listening to Synchronicity by The Police. Now, I’ve always thought that album’s not particularly well recorded. I don’t play it very often for that reason. As much as I quite like the music, it doesn’t really do it for me. But wow I mean, I’ve just heard it for the first time. And that’s kind of what this sort of system can do. And I’m really, I’m still quite blown away by the separation between the instruments, the level of detail. The way I can now understand what the producer was trying to do in the studio. It’s like having a new Album!” David Price on Dual, Rega & Linn vs the Sovereign, and how it compares to the Technics SL-1000R: “We’d have both got that Police album Synchronicity and we’re playing it on our Dual CS505 or whatever that we had; Rega Planar 3, and you think well you know that’s pretty good, sounds nice but it’s not amazing. And then you upgrade to a Linn and then you think well uh it’s kind of better. But it’s much less better than I expected and maybe it’s not such a good album after all in terms of recording. And then you get to something like this. Which is, you know, a very expensive high-end arm and cartridge and turntable, and then suddenly it just unpeels, doesn’t it, it just opens up. The overall result is that you get incredibly detailed sound, but it’s not a detailed sound in a kind of forensic way or a kind of Hi-Fi way; it’s very organic.” “The Technics SL-1000R is about the same money. It’s 18 Grand and it’s an amazing turntable. It weighs about 60 kilograms. When we tested it for Hi-Fi News three or four years ago it was the best measuring turntable Paul Miller had ever measured. Incredible speed stability, really architectural sound, loads of detail Etc. But I think the Technics is slightly less musical, it’s less kind of natural and organic sounding. They’re both fantastic decks you know it’s kind of Ferrari or Lamborghini, and you know we’ve talked about this quite often. If you get the opportunity to, you know compare these products. If you’re in that market I think you have to try to do that. It’s been an absolute privilege being able to listen to this lovely turntable, tonearm and cartridge set up through your system here with the Kerr Acoustics. That’s been brilliant, but if you are in this market then you’ve got a short list this turntable.” Ok we’ll say it: The Sovereign is probably the best turntable in the world at this price (and often at much higher prices too). Interestingly, this isn’t the first comparison we’ve heard between the Sovereign and the SL-1000R. A few of our customers have had the chance to compare the two, both reporting a ‘clinical’ sound from the Technics, and deciding to opt for the Sovereign turntable after hearing its separated, open performance, and that natural, organic sound that David and Mike rave about in their discussion on the turntable.

Origin Live have released images of the latest entry in their turntable range: the Swift. Among the Mk5 upgrades announced at the Bristol Hi-Fi show came the news that a new turntable would be entering the range.

On top of the motor/power supply redesign, one of the major upgrades in the Origin Live Mk5 line is the Multi-Layer Platter (MLP); trickle-down tech from their flagship Voyager turntable, now incorporated as standard on all turntables above the Aurora. The Swift is essentially an Aurora turntable with a Multi-Layer Platter. Why include the MLP as standard? Because it sounds too good to simply be an optional extra, says Mark Baker our company’s founder.

The addition of the MLP as standard has increased the cost of the Calypso and Resolution turntables. To keep the range as accessible as possible Origin Live have filled in the price point between the Aurora and the Calypso comes the Swift.

The Swift features the basic design of the Aurora turntable, with its cantilevered design. The platter and tonearm are balanced in equilibrium on a high mass sub-chassis plate. Something that equates roughly to a rigid, mechanical suspension. Origin Live claim this not only avoids both the softening of leading edges often found in suspended designs and the hardness in many non-suspended designs.

It also features their low friction bearing, which the company report now consistently takes at least 2:30 minutes to come to stop from 33rpm when belt less.

This all comes alongside the Mk5 Multi Layer Platter, featuring an intricately designed top with over 1000 individual slots laser cut through the top layer. Combined with another composite layer underneath and carefully screwed on to the acrylic platter (not too tight we are told) the multiple layers work to diffuse surface resonance through vibrational interference. Having spent countless hours laser cutting hundreds of different line profiles to test on the top layer, the Bakers at Origin Live also opted for a label sized hole at the centre of the platter which they claim has added Bass detail and depth.

The Origin Live Swift Mk5 Turntable is available now priced at £2,290. The accompanying Zephyr Mk4 Tonearm pictured is £1,080