Acoustic Signature Montana NEO

You may be moving to Montana.Acoustic Signature is not an overnight sensation, nor are its turntables driven by dental floss. If you’re not a Frank Zappa fan, you probably have no idea what any of that means, so please Google it. I’ll wait till you get back.

- MICHAEL FREMER

TURNTABLE

The German company is headquartered in picturesque Süssen not far from Stuttgart, one of the country’s automobile capitals. Porsche and Mercedes-Benz are headquartered there. It has been around for 25 years, specializing in exquisitely machined, high-mass, nonsuspended turntable designs, manufactured in-house. With companies moving to electric cars, you can be sure that, should the company need any, there’s no shortage of super skilled machinists in the picturesque valley known as the “Stuttgart Cauldron.”

The Acoustic Signature turntable line has expanded over the years, bottom to top, from moderately priced high-performance turntables some can afford to luxury models only a few can afford. There’s also a lineup of similarly priced tonearms. The company has long manufactured reasonably priced turntables—at least by high-performance standards—but none that fall into the “budget” category.

A few months before the pandemic shut down the world, I visited the tidy, well-organized factory. The company’s loading dock/ recycling area is cleaner than some factories I’ve been in. I came away mightily impressed by the operation, which includes state-of-the-art CNC machinery and cosmetic metal-lapping surface finishing devices, all operated by a talented team of engineers, technicians, and skilled craftspeople. I saw engineers designing A-S’s next product generation using the latest CAD software. The 21 employees work in the kind of well-organized factory you’d expect to find in Germany.