ne of the most interesting products on show at this year’s Rocky Mountain Audio Fest was Cambridge Audio’s Alva TT turntable ($1700). The company built its reputation on a string of successful budget-priced amplifiers and digital products, designs that have allowed it to usurp the budget dominance previously enjoyed by brands such as NAD and Rotel. But there’s more to the Cambridge Audio story than just great sound at low prices. The company has always shown a knack for predicting trends and reacting with products whose apparent quirks capture the public imagination, and if building turntables is a world away from producing high-volume electronics, the Alva TT certainly does things differently enough to garner plenty of attention.

The Alva TT is no starter deck, instead going head-to-head with the likes of the Rega Planar 3 and the recently released Mobile Fidelity turntables, but one look should tell you that in a world where all cats are gray, the Alva TT is a ginger tom. For starters, it’s a direct-drive design, but this is no disco deck in drag. Cambridge has developed its own, medium-torque motor/bearing design and paired it with a POM platter, eschewing the high-torque/low-mass motor/platter route followed by most low-cost direct-drive designs. Cambridge has also coupled the drive system to a substantial plinth, looking to sink vibrational energy rather than allowing it to excite a molded-plastic chassis.

Yet with a refreshing resistance to simply reinventing the wheel for the sake of it, the company has opted for the tried-and-tested Rega tonearm, although the use of RCA outputs on the rear of the chassis eliminates one of that 'arm’s weakest facets -- its lead-out wires. The 'arm arrives fitted with a high-output moving-coil cartridge, a dedicated, naked design developed by Cambridge with an OEM supplier. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the company’s excellent range of budget phono stages, the Alva TT carries its own internal EQ/amplification, the RCA connections delivering a line-level signal. But most telling of all is the small panel adjacent to the output sockets, indicating the presence of a parallel Bluetooth connection option. Praise be, you even get a lid.

That’s a pretty comprehensive and unerringly targeted feature list given the price point, and we can see the Alva TT appealing to nascent audiophiles inured to file replay and wireless connectivity just as much as system downsizers looking for a compact vinyl replay/rediscovery solution. If the crisp, clean and energetic sound at the show was anything to go by, the Alva TT is unlikely to disappoint. Deliveries of the turntable are slated to commence early next year, at which point this cat could be well and truly amongst the pigeons.