Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

Born in the Netherlands in 1962, Rik Stoet grew up surrounded by electronics of one form or another. His grandfather ran a factory producing transformers and valve amplifiers for communication gear, and began teaching Rik about tubes when he was just six years old. In his late teens, Rik worked as a programmer for the Dutch government, developing software to visualise sonar data from survey vessels. He earned a degree in Information Technology, specialising in chip substrate design. While never pursuing IC fabrication professionally, instead he spent nearly eight years working in his father’s factory, gaining hands-on experience in transformer winding, power electronics, and circuit building.

Crucially, Rik inherited his grandfather’s transformer production tools, including winding machines, a vacuum tank, and curing ovens. This allowed him to build his own high-quality output transformers and launch the Stoetkit series in 1993. This line of DIY tube amplifier kits included the Stoetkit II, an innovative 300B SE design with EL34 bias compensation that tolerated gapless push-pull transformers with an extended bandwidth. The Heart line of ‘finished’ amplifiers followed [HFN May ’98], accompanied by over 1200 tube-modified Marantz CD6000 CD players [HFN Dec ’99]. His first turntable arrived soon after, and the Takumi TT level 2.1DC is a direct descendant built on what Rik describes as ‘Newtonian mechanics and honest engineering’. PM