Hi-Fi News Staff

It’s one thing to be a whizz at electronics, and another to do turntables. They’re a completely different sort of challenge. McIntosh obviously wanted to do something a bit different in a crowded marketplace, and has come up with a combination of user friendliness and ‘millionaire chintz’. Vinyl rookies will appreciate the pre-aligned cartridge already mounted in a prefitted arm.

Rega’s RP8 turntable uses what it calls ‘Double Brace Technology’. Here stiffening braces above and below the plinth provide rigidity between the turntable main bearing and the arm mounting. Thanks to this, Rega’s Roy Gandy was able to envisage a plinth construction that would be much lighter than in previous designs, so in the RP8 the plinth has given way to a very light skeletal chassis. From a functional point of view, the RP8 on its skeletal chassis is complete in itself but Rega has added a separate outer frame, using the same foam-sandwich construction, to support a dust cover.

VPI’s entry level Scout [HFN Nov ’09] looked deceptively simple, while promising lots of easy adjustment for the deck – even the supplied in-house tonearm that came as part of the package boasted an easy to remove arm wand, thereby facilitating rapid cartridge swapping. The Scout 1. 1 offers more refinement for your money, and is the cheapest VPI turntable to use a freestanding motor unit housed in its own steel case, which tucks into a dedicated cutout in the plinth. Compared to the original Scout, the 1.

Furutech’s Alpha Design Lab range includes cables, headphones and earphones, a portable headphone amplifier and stylish system equivalents of the ADL X1 here. This appears to be a portable miniature music centre, offering USB and iDevice functionality, plus a built-in rechargeable battery giving around five hours of operation. Six top-mounted LEDs display sampling frequency, and there’s a front fascia volume control – which sadly proved just a little too easy to accidentally move when out and about. Those on the Number 41 bus will doubtless prefer the ergonomic simplicity of, say, an Arcam rPAC or Cambridge Audio DacMagic XS, which are truly portable devices.