Steve Harris & Paul Miller

Looks can be deceiving. At first glance, you might think that the TD 309 was designed just as an eye-catcher, but in reality it is easily the most radical and innovative turntable Thorens has produced since the company was revived around ten years ago by the dynamic Heinz Rohrer. For the TD 309 project, Rohrer called in Fink Audio Consulting of Essen in Germany, best known for its expertise in loudspeaker design. But, as Karl-Heinz Fink says, ‘We are all turntable guys! We like turntables! And if you work on loudspeakers, you deal with vibration at a micro level, dealing with problems that are similar.

We first reviewed this German two-box phono stage as part of a group test [see HFN Apr ’10]. The Lehmann Black Cube Decade (available with silver fascia or black) sits between the company’s Black Cube SE and reference Silver Cube phono stages. It features Lehmann’s flagship PWX II power supply (also available as an upgrade to other Lehmann audio products), its frontal aspect uniform with the phono stage itself except for a lack of any controls, and notably well-built. You can hide it away if you want, as the shielded power cable that joins the boxes via Neutrik connectors is 2m long.

Strange as it may seem now, in the early 1990s there was a period when you could go for months without seeing a vinyl-playing product reviewed in Hi-Fi News. Here in the UK, at that time, there just weren’t any new turntables to review. In Germany, though, things were different. Every time we visited the High End Show, which was then held every year in Frankfurt, we would see more turntables than you could shake a tonearm wand at, not just new turntable models, but enthusiastic new turntable manufacturers.

But that would take millions of tubes!’ said a puzzled high-end distributor back in 1986, on first hearing that an American company had launched a valve CD player. He’d have been right, if anyone had really envisaged replacing all the player’s integrated circuits with glowing bottles. It turned out, of course, that California Audio Labs had just added a tube analogue output stage, with gentle passive filtering, to an otherwise conventional player. The CAL Tempest was the first of more than few.