Nasotec Swing Headshell 202A1 is a novel approach to achieving better results from your vinyl replay system. It costs £305 and here Janine Elliot gives it a try for Hifi Pig.

“It has been a life-long objective of turntable manufacturers to create a system where the cartridge stylus tracks the record as close as possible to the way the grooves were originally laid. With a conventional pivoted arm this is not easy. At two points on the record the stylus will be perpendicular to the groove, but at all other times, it won’t track to grooves in the same manner as the record was created, using a tangential cutting lathe such as Neumann VMS80. At the start and particularly at the end of the record the stylus will track the groove at an angle. Doing so not only means that one leg of the signal will be slightly earlier adding phasing issues, but it also adds distortion and is not so good for the stylus. Luckily tangential arms have been around since Edison’s first cylinder player. Models from Harman Kardon, B&O, Revox, Clearaudio and Pre-Audio amongst others, have been a panacea for this lifelong conundrum, however, these can add other flaws that conventional arms don’t have to such a degree…”

Read the full review here