My first review of the Vertere Acoustics MG-1 MkII turntable was published here in The Ear back on 8 October 2019. It was awarded a well-deserved 5 Stars by our esteemed editor and I subsequently nominated it as one of my products of the year. So why, a reasonable person might ask, do we need […]
I have been involved in reviewing hi-fi equipment for some time now, but only occasionally have I been genuinely excited but also nervous about receiving a piece of equipment to audition. When the editor told me that his request to Linn Audio for a review sample of their range-topping LP12 had been approved, I actually […]
Rega System One record player, amp & speakers At the last Bristol show, in the carefree days of February 2020, Rega launched its first all in one system and called it the Rega System One. Thanks to the pandemic the first examples of this system didn’t reach the shops until December last year, with a […]
The wonderful thing about turntables is that they inspire a wide variety of ideas about how best to go about the tricky job of extracting the vibrations from a vinyl groove. On the one hand they are pretty crude, all that’s required is to get the groove to rotate under the stylus at the right […]
Almost a year ago The Ear published my review of the VPI Prime Signature turntable, which you can find here. In summary, I found it to be an excellent machine, with fine build quality and excellent sonics. Here we are, an eventful 12 months later, and I have had another VPI machine in my system, this time […]
I first visited Monmouth County in central New Jersey in December 1981. I had joined a company called Perkin Elmer Data Systems which was based in Oceanport, New Jersey and was sent there, with a British colleague, for two weeks to learn all about the products which I was going to be selling. This was […]
It may have been a rocky year for politics in the UK but that hasn’t stopped hi-fi manufacturers from creating some spectacular pieces of kit to help us hear more of our music and thus gain even greater enjoyment from the most transcendent of artforms. Vinyl continues to grow in popularity with ever more albums […]
Touraj Moghaddam has been creating extraordinary hi-fi equipment for decades but is undoubtedly best known for his work on turntable design, initially at Roksan with such legendary products as the Xerxes and TMS3 to his credit and latterly at his most recent venture, Vertere Acoustics. I have had the pleasure of meeting him a few […]
Rega Planar 10 turntable and arm Five years before the Rega Planar 10 Rega launched the RP10, a turntable based on the innovations developed for Rega’s cost no object Naiad. The RP10 moved the goal posts, it redefined what a turntable that cost less than a car could do and I have been enjoying my vinyl […]
Turntable design has always been open to new ideas, the variety of approaches to the apparently straightforward process of measuring modulations in a groove is quite extraordinary. And one of the more left field approaches is that taken by American designer Bill Firebaugh, creator of the Well Tempered turntable, a design that’s been around since […]
This has been a great year for new hi-fi, so good that our list has once again expanded so we can include all the best pieces of kit. We have had to make some tough decisions, all of the products chosen by the ear’s reviewers have made a very strong, positive impression both at the […]
What do you do after you have set up a vinyl mastering studio using vintage hardware and established its credentials with some truly great sounding records. If you’re Darrel Sheinman founder of Gearbox you decide to make a turntable using the brand that’s been so carefully nurtured. And not just any turntable, the Gearbox Automatic combines technology […]