High End 2018 • Hot Product

Avid has been producing well-regarded turntables since the mid-1990s, but the last few years have seen a burgeoning range of phono stages, amplification products and loudspeakers. Now the company has taken a major step toward the creation of a complete system solution with the debut of not just its first tonearm but a phono cartridge as well.

The Baritone tonearm (£3000 projected price) is what might almost be considered a traditional UK design, with a 9” effective length, gimbal bearings, a straight armtube and a conventional post-and-collar arrangement for height adjustment. But under the apparently conventional skin are more than a few Avid-specific wrinkles. The quality of the machining should come as no surprise, but the armtube is of an ultra-thin-wall titanium developed specifically for Airbus (Avid had to get special permission to use it). The 'arm’s geometry is also proprietary, but the four-bolt SME-type mounting plate will afford the correct pivot-to-spindle dimension with any SME armboard. The Baritone’s design brief is super rigidity, and the materials, design decisions and construction all reflect that. It's the first in a projected range of three increasingly ambitious tonearms, so it will be fascinating to see how it stacks up against the others.

The Reference Ruby moving-coil cartridge (£6000 projected price) is, if anything, even more surprising and impressive. It is no simple exercise in rebadging from an OEM supplier; Avid machines 80% of the parts in-house, before shipping them to Japan for final assembly. The design goal has been the lowest possible moving mass, with coil windings reduced to the minimum. In the prototype seen here, this results in a challengingly low output of 0.15mV; but fear not: use of a more powerful magnetic structure in production samples should generate a rather healthier and phono-stage-friendly 0.3mV.