Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

Pro-Ject 6 Perspex £1,280 (inc. arm) Stylish-looking and fitted with a dust cover, the 6 Perspex promises a great deal with its performance Joy of joys – a turntable with a lid, which even if it doesn’t quite enclose the whole machine, will certainly reduce the dust problem considerably. Beneath it resides a suspended turntable with some interesting ideas built in. The Perspex of the name is hardly a surprise these days, but the subchassis is made of Corian, a material which Pro-Ject claims has ‘no resonances at all’.

Clearaudio Concept £1,100 (inc. arm and cartridge) Budget-priced deck with an almost plug-and-play versatility offers stiff competition to its higher-priced peers One of the undeniable advantages of CD players over turntables is that you can take them out of the box, plug them in and use them, with no fancy setting up required. The Concept turntable, however, very nearly equalises on that score, with arm and cartridge factory-set and user set-up limited to putting the platter in place (pretty hard to get wrong, really). One big no-no that has traditionally stood in the way of this is transporting an arm with the counterweight in place, which is usually a good way of busting the bearings, but the Concept’s arm has a unique magnetic bearing which can’t be damaged in this way.

Tube upgrade Funk Firm's dramatic rethinking of the armtube has finally born fruit, Jason Kennedy finds out if it’s ripe for the listening Arthur Koubesserian is one of those audio engineers who genuinely thinks outside of the box. He has been doing so since he set up Pink Triangle in the late seventies and his Funk Firm continues the theme with its first tonearm. The FXR takes a radical approach to the problem of resonance by placing a carbon fibre cross section in the middle of a thin, walled aluminium tube. An approach which he claims makes an incredibly stiff, yet light-weight tube that’s far superior to the beams found on other tonearms.

Beautiful bolt-on The most dramatic Rega arm rebuild yet encountered sounds as good as it looks according to Jason Kennedy People have been modifying Rega’s classic RB series tonearms for some time now, but never have we come across such a dramatic transformation as the one achieved by Audiomods. It uses the arm tube, lift mechanism and rest clip from an RB250 and replaces everything else with machined aluminium parts that, like the tube, are polished for a perfect finish. If that weren’t enough, Audiomods adds a micrometer to the system that allows precise VTA adjustment on-the-fly. The arm is also presented in a padded wooden box and comes with alternative counterweights.