Acoustic Signature Invictus Turntable and TA-9000 Tonearm, Part One


 

Date: 2016-7-28

 

Putting aside the fact that the entire purpose of The Absolute Sound, from Day One, has been to observe and comment on the differences in voicing and nuance among competing products....... What I do agree with is that things have gotten better in hi-fi, and that they’ve gotten better across the board, regardless of price point. What has changed in my view — and it has changed in every type of component from front end to back — is the audibility of distortions. Simply put, noises of all sorts (be they electrical or mechanical) have been reduced, and as a direct result resolution of all sorts and transparency to sources have been increased.

Nowhere is this lowering of noise and increase in resolution more apparent than in front-end components, particularly analog front-end components. People sometimes wonder why, outside of old age and a perverse streak of Luddism, guys like me are still wedded to LPs — or why LPs are currently selling at a faster clip than they were in their heyday. For music lovers, ..... it’s because they sound better — which is to say, more beautiful, more exciting, more like the real thing. This was true at the dawn of the Digital Era, and in spite of the many advances that digital sources have made (and they have) it is even truer today.

Perhaps you’d have to be a geezer (like someone we know) to fully appreciate how much more of everything (color, dynamics, detail, dimensionality, presence, sheer musical life) current LP-playback gear is able to retrieve from those fifty-or-sixty-year-old grooves — and consequently how much closer LP playback now comes to the sound absolute — than the very best of yesteryear or, in some cases, yesterday...... the consequent better tracing and tracking of contemporary cartridges have revolutionized (and I don’t think that’s too strong a word) LP playback. It is mind-boggling to discover how much you were previously missing on LPs you thought you knew by heart — on LPs you’ve been playing for virtually an entire lifetime — and how far hearing more of what you haven’t heard goes toward creating a more credible illusion of the real thing. It kind of makes you wonder where it’s all going to end — how much more music and performance is still hidden in those little canyons of vinyl.

All this brings me to the subject at hand, the Acoustic Signature Invictus turntable and TA-9000 tonearm. Simply put, this ultra-expensive bit of Teutonic engineering is the best record player (by far) that I have heard in my home. And the difference between it and other rivals isn’t trivial or a matter of nuance.

This incredibly massive (375 pounds of CNC-milled aluminum and brass, not including its 400-pound stand), six-motor, belt-driven, almost Mayan-looking objet du son from Gunther Frohnhoefer of Germany is not only the biggest, heaviest, and most imperturbable record player I have ever come across -- you simply cannot make it feed back vibration, even by pounding on it with both hands while it is playing -- it is also the most versatile (it accepts four tonearms) and the simplest to use (at least, once you’ve hoisted it onto a suitable support system). Unbelievably quiet in playback, in combination with the TA-9000 tonearm it tracks with the precision of a Westrex cutterhead, reproducing instruments and vocals with unparalleled three-dimensionality, solidity, color, detail, power, pace — all those good things — and turning the soundstage into a veritable diorama of a symphony orchestra, a string quartet, a jazz quintet, or a rock trio.

Acoustic Signature’s TA-9000 tonearm is built up millimeter by millimeter via a selective-laser-melting process (each ’arm takes 50 hours of processing on a €25 million SLM machine) to produce a resonance-free structure impossible to create by any other means. (Internally, the ’arm has tree-branch-like “limbs” that connect its inner tube to an outer tube, channeling resonances like a grounding wire channels RF). With highest-precision/tolerance ceramic bearings, it is as sonically invisible (and utterly imperturbable) as Acoustic Signature’s fabulous Invictus.

I will have a good deal more to say about this standard-setting turntable and tonearm in future installments of this blog, and when I review the entire system in the magazine. But for the nonce, if you’re really into vinyl, looking for the best LP-source component, and have the requisite do-re-mi (roughly $123k for the package!), here ’tis.

 

Product Acoustic Signature INVICTUS  TA-9000

PDF Acoustic Signature Invictus Turntable and TA-9000 Tonearm, Part One