RECORD PLAYERS ARE GETTING BETTER: IT JUST ISN'T OBVIOUS

Record replay continues to improve, but it does so in a subtle way, writes technical editor Ketan Bharadia

- Ketan Bharadia

What Hi-Fi? covers a wide range of products. There are categories, such as televisions, streamers, and wireless headphones and speakers, where things move quickly and obviously. Each generation of products brings useful (and not so useful) new features, improves usability (mostly) and pushes performance standards ever higher (almost always).

Then there are areas - stereo amps, conventional speakers and turntables - where things appear to move more glacially.

I want to focus on turntables here. Not just because I have a soft spot for them (which I do) but because, more than any other area What Hi-Fi? covers, it is a category that is packed full of products that tend to dominate, in many cases for decades at a time.

I'm thinking specifically of Rega's evergreen Planar 1, 2 and 3 record players; but what I have said could equally apply to Linn's LP12, pretty much all of SME's turntable and tonearm ranges, as well as the Michell Gyro SE we currently have in our test room.

Having had a look through our 40-year-plus archives, I notice that the current Pro-Ject Debut doesn't look too different from the original that was introduced way back in the late '90s. The Debut has been developed and improved over the years, of course, but it just doesn't look very different. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.