German turntable brand, Clearaudio, has announced the Tracer radial tonearm, taking the company’s family of radial and tangential arms ten. More »
McIntosh who have been designing and building audio for over 65 years, has announced a new turntable The MT2 Precision. More »
Devon-based Timestep has signed an exclusive distribution agreement to import Glanz tonearms from their native Japan to the UK. Visit Timestep at Sound & Vision Bristol to discover them. More »
Timestep’s Dave Cawley has just signed an exclusive distribution agreement to import Glanz tonearms from their native Japan to the UK. More »
Pro-Ject Audio Systems, manufacturers hifi turntables and electronics, have announced a new Artist Series special edition turntable collaboration with one of the world’s longest-running bands. More »
The Supreme-Analog Tangenta Referenca tonearm from Serbia, will be making it’s debut in the USA early next month. More »
Air Audio Distribution will be demonstrating the newly re-branded Japanese Sorane SA-1.2 tone-arm in room 13 on the 3rd floor of The Indulgence Show.
More »
Technics has announced the launch of the Reference Class SP-10R, its most premium analogue, direct drive turntable to date, which is anticipated to hit the market in early summer 2018. The news comes as Technics unveils a prototype of the new, cutting-edge turntable with, they claim, the world’s top-level* S/N (signal-to-noise) ratio and rotational stability, for the first time at this year’s IFA Berlin. More »
The long awaited new, ‘affordable’ Technics SL-1200GR direct-drive turntable is now shipping to dealers in the USA. Launched at CES 2017 and originally intended for release earlier this year, the SL-1200GR is now available on both sides of the Atlantic. More »
AVID Hifi, the UK based high end hifi manufacturer, unveiled their new tonearms at High End Munich 2017. This is their next step towards “a complete AVID system”. More »
Hifi Pig Advertising Promotion
Hifi Pig brings you a series of promotional articles about our Great British Brands exhibiting at High End Munich 2017. We let them tell you all about their philosophy and products.
Munich 2017 – the reveal. This Munich sees Funk at its most ambitious. There, not just one but two new arms will be on show. More »
VANA, Ltd. has announced the arrival in the USA of the European Audio Team (E.A.T) B-Sharp turntable, with features taken directly from the company’s award-winning C-Major turntable (which Janine reviewed for Hifi Pig last year). VANA went on to tell us “The B-Sharp sheds all of the non-essential cosmetic adornments of the C-Major without compromising performance or mechanical integrity, providing vinyl enthusiasts with a superb playback option at a more affordable price”. More »
Black Rhodium used the 2017 Stylus show in Manchester to launch the two new high end Tone Arm cables. These join the Stylus and Stylus VS-2 Tone Arm cables to enable Black Rhodium to offer a choice of Tone Arm DIN terminated cables to high end turntable users. More »
Tom Vu, president of TraingleArt, got in touch to tell us more about their latest tonearms, the Osiris MK2 and the Horus. More »
After a four-year development period, Ballfinger has introduced the first newly developed analogue tape recorder for around 25 years, the Tonbandmaschine M 063 was revealed at the Norddeutschen Hifi-Tage, in Hamburg last weekend. They also unveiled their new Schallplattenspieler PS 2 Directl-drive Turntable with active radial arm and moving coil system. More »
German turntable company, Dual, has relaunched in the UK. Once the largest manufacturer of turntables in Europe, the brand has had a history of producing turntables through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For 2017 the brand is back in the UK with an initial offering of three new budget models. More »
Clearaudio are offering vinyl fans a more affordable entry point into tangential tonearm technology, with their new TT5 Tonearm. The first tangential tonearm (also known as ‘linear tracking’, ‘parallel tracking’ or ‘straight line’) was reportedly devised by Thomas Edison and featured on the Edison Phonograph from 1877. But the technique of parallel tracking was abandoned with Emil Berliner’s Gramophone, and remained so until almost a century later when its benefits were finally rediscovered and a small number of manufacturers began again to design arms that would open up the full potential of the LP record. To achieve the most faithful music reproduction, the playback of a record should mimic the original cutting of the vinyl as closely as possible. During the cutting process, the cutter diamond maintains a consistent angle of 90 degrees from the beginning of the groove to its end. Therefore the optimum way to extract the purest information from that groove without distortion is with an arm that reads the groove in precisely the same way as it was cut.
In a conventional pivoted tonearm, the arm is ‘pulled’ across the record’s surface by the stylus following the record groove. A similar motion occurs in Clearaudio’s ‘TT’ range of tangential tonearms, however the arm moves tangentially, with the stylus propelling the tonearm along a linear bearing. This bearing comprises a carriage running on highly precise rollers along a meticulously polished glass rail. The cartridge therefore remains parallel to the record groove at all times, following the exact same path that the cutting head did when it made the record and thus eliminating any lateral tracking error. And since the record groove, stylus, cantilever and tonearm are perfectly aligned, no side forces are generated and so no anti-skating compensation is needed. TT5 adopts a new, fully rigid design. However, for those who still crave the convenience of the bigger arms’ ability to swing out of the way when loading records, Clearaudio have created the optional TT5 swing base which, as it’s name suggests, allows the entire arm assembly to be swung out of the way when swapping one album for the next.
The Clearaudio TT5 tangential tonearm is available now priced at £1,750 (including VAT): The optional swing base is priced at an additional £250.
HMF Solutions of London got in touch with Hifi Pig to tell us all about the new Aquilar reference tonearm from Acoustical-Systems of Germany.
Acoustical-Systems say that for the past 2 years their R&D department has dedicated a lot of energy, time, money and brain-storming in offering the unique sonic abilities of the AXIOM tonearm in a more affordable version. The brief was “To create an all-new superior 10″ tonearm design – which also should be easy to mount on all turntables”.
This R&D has resulted in the AQUILAR, an all-new 10” reference tonearm.
The Aquilar (origin from ancient latin “aquila” – the eagle) offers many of the expensive materials, as well as most of the unique technical key solutions, of the AXIOM and comes equipped with a host of features including:
10” effective length
Very easy and swift set up
Customised dedicated 3D-alignment template
Non-resonance HD18 tungsten carbide counterweight
Unique Acoustical-Systems non-resonance titanium/carbon-hybrid arm wand
Precision leveling of bearing plane – independent of arm board /turntable
Adjustable SRA, VTA, Azimuth, Overhang and Offset angle at headshell
VTA adjustment on-the-fly
Non-touch magnetic Anti skating on-the-fly
Dynamic anti skating following the tangential curve
The critical inner wiring is fine 5N pure silver litz wire
The tonearm is available with 2 terminal options:
direct-to-phono 1.2 m length phono lead (RCA or XLR) or male DIN 5-pole connector.
The Aquilar is available in 2 finishes: black satin matt or ceramic-alloy silver matt.
So you thought that a Pug was one of those cute little dogs that looks like its run into a wall? Not anymore! Roksan
have just launched their new tonearm, The Pug. The Pug is based around a large, yet light and rigid, 22mm diameter carbon fibre arm tube; while most other parts feature high-quality black chromed anodised aluminium. The large counterweight area at the rear of the arm employs a solid, perfectly balanced fixed section in combination with two adjustable counterweights that are changed by the user depending on the weight and tracking force of the cartridge that’s been installed. Anti-skate is managed by a traditional ‘weight & thread’ mechanism at the front of the counterweight area. The Pug’s TnC ‘ball and cup’ bearing works in combination with the light, rigid arm tube to facilitate exceptional tracking ability from any cartridge. Sound quality is then guaranteed thanks to the use of high-quality internal wiring from Cardas. The particular wiring used was chosen for its speed maintenance and ability to retrieve micro-details.
Speaking about The Pug, Roksan Audio’s Managing Director, Tufan Hashemi, has said:
“We have spent many long hours, days and months perfecting the Pug. We wanted it be the finest sounding tonearm Roksan has produced yet to also make it user friendly, easy to set up and as compatible as possible,”
The Pug is available in the UK now priced £1,375.00
