Andover Model-One

TURNTABLE MUSIC SYSTEM

- JULIE MULLINS

Apart from the Beatles and Hendrix I heard in my audiophile father’s basement, one of my earliest rock’n’roll memories involved a multipurpose record player at school. In third grade, six of us were moved as a separate group to a round table to watch a filmstrip in a darker part of a large, open-plan classroom. A clunky old record player in a self-contained carrying case with a half-dozen headphone jacks sat on the table. We each plugged in a pair of headphones to hear the soundtrack for the filmstrip we were instructed to watch— unsupervised. Ben discreetly pulled out his older brother’s LP of Queen’s The Game and played it instead. I don’t remember the filmstrip, but “Another One Bites the Dust” is etched in my memory. In spite of that rock anthem’s insistent heavy bass riff, we 8-year-olds somehow managed to sit still enough to get away with it.

I was hooked.

Fast-forward to the present, when integrated vinyl playback systems have come a long way with technology, materials, and design. Still, an “all-in-one” system can raise an audiophile’s hackles, and for, um, sound reasons (pun in-tended): The more you pack into a single chassis (or speaker enclosure or whatever), the more can go wrong. There are noise considerations and spatial limitations, vibrations and feedback. Some audiophile readers might be reminded of furniture-like stereo consoles from their youth that, while some of them sounded pretty good, were not the pinnacle of hi-fi.

Now Andover Audio has created the Model-One, an integrated turntable system that’s intended to have broad crossover appeal, or anyway, to appeal to music lovers who aren’t members of the audiophile set. I noticed that the Model-One intrigued some guests of audiophile attendees when I first encountered it at the 2019 New York Audio Show.