This video is hitting at exactly the right time for me. I am just now at the very start of doing a good amount of research to enter the higher end hi fi realm.
The more you are around them the more they grow on you in terms of aesthetic. I really liked the chocolate brown finish one but wasn't allowed to nab it at the end. Never say never though haha
I have the utmost admiration and respect for Conrad and the team at Avid ! I considered a mid level unit but the cost, along with the rather light dealer network in the USA caused me to pause. Sigh...
I won't be going down the vinyl rabbit hole… 🕳 🐇 😀 I am an old man and have had my fill there…I also have my hands full with discs and streaming and am quite satisfied with how they sound these days….but it’s fun to watch from the sidelines and learn. Thanks Terry!!!
Exactly. Those of us who grew up with vinyl know all too well its many drawbacks and are not blinded by the 'audiophile nostalgic nonsense' surrounding vinyl equipment! Technology moves on...thank goodness...
I am not a currently a "practicing audiophile;" I stopped playing the game back in the 90's. Bui the practical side of me says that if you really wanted to remove unwanted external vibrations, you would remove the turntable from the listening room altogether. Honestly, high end audio is jewelry for (primarily) men. I am not saying serious engineering is not going into this stuff, but fundamentally a turntable is a simple thing,.that has been turned into a gold plated Rube Goldberg device. I fell into the trap myself, although at least I acquired my turntable (a Kyocera PL-910) at a warehouse clearance sale for relatively little money. There is no way in heck I would spend five figures for a spinning platter, EVER. A turntable that expensive is a vanity device, and no way can the cost-to-benefit ratio ever be justified on sonics alone.
Thanks Terry for another great video. I would highly recommend dipping your toe in the vinyl pool, you won't regret it. I'm a DIY turntable designer and builder. My design philosophy is exactly the same as Conrad's and funnily enough my deck ended up looking very Avid like, no plagiarism involved.
I'm a proud owner of an Avid table, a great machine. Also Avid is a great business to deal with, Conrad answers the emails promptly and the company is easy to deal with re any servicing work. This is not so common in the industry nowadays. Highly recommended brand!
@@ptg01 Sorry, can't help here, as I'm based in the EU. If you are interested in their offering in the USA you should probably contact Avid (Conrad) directly, I had a couple of email exchanges with him, and he was always very straightforward.
I've known Conrad for may years and was one of the very earliest owners of the Acutus first series turntables. It was released, let's not forget, completely against the tide, so to speak, at a time when CD reigned and was on the rise so its testament to both the quality of Avid's products and the leadership and technical knowledge of Conrad firstly, but also the staff he's since employed and its great to see that the company has flourished. Check out Avid gear - its great and for me, Conrads systems are consistently some of the best sounding systems at shows, too, a feat that's not easy to achieve in some of those rooms. He knows how to set up a system to bring the best out of it but also, his products are exceptional, so I guess that makes it easier to start with!!
Congrats on hitting 50K subscribers and great job on this interview Terry! Conrad is a real gentleman and a very knowledgeable resource on high end audio.
Great video Tessa enjoyed this one as usual mate. Over here in Australia haven't really heard of the company Avid much but they're speaker design looks very good as well as their turntables from what I can see and tell. 😁🎧👍
Great video. Engaging manufacturers in this manner can sometimes result in 'advertising\sales' vibes. This was fun and informative. I enjoyed the change of pace. I also wondered what the odds were of you starting with an entry level table 🤣
My advice for those aiming to invest in mid-to-high range is to first buy a record-cleaning machine. It's transformative. I'm a Clearaudio/Lenco/Acoustic Signature/SME fan, but the Avid range looks like a great bet.
I always love your informative videos; very useful for all levels of users and pockets. Could you do a 3 part series please , turntable based system beginers buget , mid price system and the Imposible DREAM turntable sytem . I use Michael SE and Quad blocks and Harbth speakers. I,m so jealous, I think you have one of the best job's in the world.
Thank you very much, I have created a whole series of videos now about being new to vinyl starting off very basic and building up. There is a playlist for them all on my home page
Thank you for the interesting video! And the wonderful presentation of the company. It is great to see all their manufacturer capabilities and effort to give us audiophiles the highest enjoyment that we can get from our source material. 🙏🥰🎵🎶🎼
I like the look of these turntables, the inverted cone with the bearing at the top is very interesting, should produce an air-bearing effect around the cone and maintain a level platter very nicely. I do take exception to their assertion that hand-built circuit boards are better. I watched that guy handling those resistors, placing them on the board... with his actual hands. Dry solder joints occur when you get contaminants under the solder, which then corrode their way out. I would much prefer a clean-room approach with pick-and-place robots, with just final hand assembly for the large capacitors, transformers etc, with high-accuracy components and possibly a varnish over-coat to prevent airborne corrosion later. If they were going to go for hand-built then I would prefer to see wire-wrap circuits than PCBs. There seems little point in going to the trouble of printing a circuit board, then going at it with a regular soldering iron.
Buy a cd player is you want a quiet, perfectly accurate sound. A good turntable with a good cartridge is enough to enjoy vinyl records, but if you want a perfect sound, definitely buy cd player. Most records since the 80s were digitally recorded anyway, and there's also many variations of a particular cd depending on the year it came out, who mixed it, what technology was used. And when you know how they're made, you'll see that they share many common points with vinyl. This have a lot to do with confirmation bias when you're paying obscene amounts of money for a boutique turntable, than it has to do with the sound accuracy because nobody will say that their 20k $ turntable almost play as well as an average cd player, no matter if it's true.
The Avid Acutus is a fine turntable. Although personally I've not liked the SME arms that I've heard, due to them prioritising detail over dynamics. The real value in turntables is in the right priced idler eg Garrard 301 or 401, classic Lenco, or Japanese mid range to statement level direct drive from the 1970's to 1980's. All with the right arm and moving coil or moving iron cartridge. Plus a decent phono stage, eg NVA Phono 2 plus correct positioning of the TT - as far away from the speakers as possible on the right support.
Saludos !!!EXCELENTE!!! tu trabajo el que estas haciendo, yo tengo un Onkyo digital A88-00 con un amplificador M504, con un ecualizador EQ540 y otro EQ201 y una platina TA2550 y un plato CP1500F y CD DX708, y la radio T4500. Todo los modelos del INTEGRA que es de lo mejor que de la onkyo NO hechos en masa la producción si no son selectos de la Onkyo ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, EN FIN TODO UN CLASICO DE LOS 80S Y 90S de equipos de sonido de aquella época, con los años jamás se me ha roto ningún modulo eso ya se ve de como trabajaban antes y los materiales de fabricación, espero tenerlo duarte ,muchos años por la calidad de un buen equipo musical ,saludos y muy buenos videos que tienes un gran like para tus grandes videos ya no se fabrican tan estupendos modelos de sonidos como estos aparatos ,es una pena , que hoy en día todo sea platico, saludos desde Barcelona - Podías hacer uno de Onkyo interga también de Review -
That Avid guy talks about compromises, like the length of the tonearm as it constantly change the angle of the cartridge in respect to the track, when the vinyl are carved in the mastering process with a stylus that are always in a fixed angle to the track. What happened to the turntable in the old days that had a tonearm that moved in parallel over the record to keep the angle correct? Was it Bang&Olufsen ? Isn't time to replace all that expensive hardware by modern technology. The needle wouldn't need to drag the tonearm over the record. Why not put a laser in a cartridge that follows the track and exactly steers a tonearm motor to keep the needle exactly in the middle of the track. Or even better are to replace the needle with two lasers that reads the grooves two sides and make use of their modulated output. I think that CD's have some 40dB more dynamic than vinyl, so vinyls need to be mixed more compressed with less dynamic to not end up in the background noise of the plastic material in the vinyl. Vinyl requires the bass frequencies to be mixed into mono where a CD can have separate unaltered bass in both channels. The problem are that most of modern time CD's are mixed to sound good from broadcast radio, a mobil phone or in a car where it needs to be compressed more. So the increased dynamics are not put to use in CD's but the superior technology are there. When I listen to audiophile records with great dynamic in the mixing and there's a symphonic orchestra playing and it goes very quiet, I can still hear the background noise from the grove. There's not enough dynamic room possible with vinyl. Compared to CD's of the same orchestra it's dead quiet and only the room noise can be heard when just a couple of instruments are playing. The whole process of carving the aluminium disc from the master tape, analog or digital, and then put a electrolyte skin over the aluminium to protect it and then pour metal into it to mold several negative discs that then are used to press plastic records from, all that mechanical transfer will add molecule noise from the materials surfaces in each copying process and will reduce all the details and high frequencies from the final vinyl that you buy, and then add the reduced dynamic range in the physical media. Why would anyone prefer vinyl instead of CD? With vinyl you get a softer sound, as it has been stripped off the finer details, and can be pleasant to listen to when it doesn't have as much information that you will need to process, as when listening to a good mastered CD. All these super expensive vinyl equipment are like putting lipstick on a pig, the base to build on are not good enough.
The obsession with vinyl makes me laugh. The best Studer A80 tape deck used in mastering peaks at 18khz and doesn't go lower than 60 hz. When a Neumann lathe cuts a record, the top end is naturally further rolled off and the bottom end has to be levelled down as well so the grooves don't collide. The result is a frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio that can be encoded with less than 16 bits, Red Book CD standard. Then there is the myth that somehow, you hear detail in the sound wave, that the analogue transducer is magically able to restitute, especially with valve amplification that further adds second-order harmonics. The problem with you guys is that you've never experienced a proper, double-blind, level-matched comparison. A good one would actually need to add analogue hiss to digital playback, to avoid the ear being able to distinguish the digital source on the basis of its silence alone. As for "digititis", the sort of sibilance that was an issue back in 1982, today with modern ADCs and DACs this no longer exists. But I get it : You're not selling audio reproduction excellence, you are selling a lifestyle. Maybe consider incrusting diamonds on the chassis of the turntable.
I think these days most audiophiles with high end turntable setups also have high end digital setups as well and if you read through the comments you will see a lot of people say some stuff sounds better on digital but they prefer others on vinyl. I have heard most of the very best digital setups and yet some vinyl setups have sound better in some ways too so best not to draw a line with things like this and be so damning towards others who clearly see things different to you.
Who machines up the platters on these things? A pre schooler? Any engineering shop I know would immediately reject that much run out, look at the thing!!! Around 12:30 provides a good view. So easy to see with the naked eye; I've seen same from other vids of similar TT's. Absolute rubbish. I put a dial gauge on my TT and runout is near to unmeasurable and certainly cannot be seen. BTW we are instrument technicians, rotating machinery specialists and a NATA certified lab.
When I think of milspec I think of proprietary parts. Like an AR15. I can buy and shop for different barrels and stocks and accessories. Is your product milspec in that sense for your product ?
Or you could go to yardsales like I do and find whatever. Like a 1978 JVC QL-2 w/AT eliptical needle cartridge. A 1977 JVC KD-25 cassette tape deck. A 1978 JVC jr-s301 receiver. A Magnavox 5-disc CD player and two Kenwood speakers........all for $30. They all worked perfectly except for the cassette player which I fixed and now works perfectly. Show me a DD turntable for under $1000 that spins as accurately as that Quartz-lock TT. I'm sure something is out there, but not for $200(which is about the average price for a QL-2). Someday I'll find the guy who don't know what he has and sells me one of these things in the video for $10.😆😆😅😳
Some are a big investment but the Ingenium is £1250 which is ready to go out of the box, all hand built in the same factory by the same people and that seems good value to me considering
Shouldn't be it was recorded in stereo and then I adjusted the sound to balance each of us to be more central when speaking solo but also so you could hear the fact of where we were sitting
@@PursuitPerfectSystem yes indeed where you were sitting specially at the beginning. It's better after. But it's on most videos on youtube. Not only yours. Only movies, tv shows and video games get it right.
@@yannick930 if your experiencing sound issues across various YT channels I think check your settings must be something a miss there as getting stereo sound correct is pretty basic stuff in all video editing softwares and it's right 99.9% of the time on YT. Just a suggestion
Don't forget the anti static devise, the anti static brush, the anti static record sleeves, the record cleaner, the needle cleaner. This new wave of record enthusiast's will learn what we learned a long time ago. Records are a pain in the @SS and don't compare to Cd's.
Oi! What were that whistling sound I hear? I must be one of them audiofils because I can hears whistling or summat in there, sound like to me it were coming from some geezers nostrils like they was too close to the mike. Well at least we didn't hear no raspberry tart on the mike.
That is what happens when you take a breath ready to say something then realise the other person is still speaking and you was acting in haste, but you dont speak so are professional.
That's an odd way to describe your products from the top down, like an out of focus camera lens. It's a bit like saying "get the top of the range cos it just gets worse from here!" He seems to realise half way through his spiel and switches to going up the range. People don't ever buy down the range so why describe it that way? So could we put this expensive top of the line tt on a washing machine and it'd be sweet?
He is referring to how they design their products, make the best one possible and then try and achieve the same performance at lower price points - this way there is consistency between the products and it just gets better as you go up the range not different. It makes sense when you look at it like that and a lot of companies work this way.
I really need this! Thanks so much :) Let's not forget Ukraine too 🇺🇦 To the wealthy, please only donate through the trustable channels to them, lots of scams going on. Or even purchase Ukraine products.
@@stevengarner8524 If politics is working out for you, maybe you should ignore my comment instead and stop complaining. The publisher can delete my comments if he wants to.
cannot see it outperforming my 10yrs old simaudio dac 300d playing well recorded flac files fed from a digi out on my computer. so im going to watch no more of this video
@@PursuitPerfectSystem ive been into audio for well over 40 yrs. probably biggest upgrade i made was replacing my sondek lp12 in 1983 with a sony cdp 30 £300 odd £.. ive never once since then heard a tt that gets close to that old shitty cd player. i believe now that playing records is more of a old school hobby than a listening test comparison against a superior source, digital. if you sell these turntables for more than the price of a mid price digital sourced player you are most likely robbing your cash paying customers, the specification comparisons are all available to check online. rip records tapes minidisc . my opinion!
The moment a manufacturer tells me that his products are neutral, I lose all my interest because it really translates into: "I have no clue what my stuff sounds like". You should do a video with the title: "10 neutral (amps, speakers... what ever) that sound completely differently"
Of course Neutral products can sound different it just means they are not trying to emphasise details with a touch more treble or warmth with a touch more than bass than is "normal" crude explanation but I think its on the right track
@@PursuitPerfectSystem how can anything sound neutral when every resistor, every transistor, every tube, every membrane every cabinet and so on produces its own typical sound. People who talk about neutral are absolutely clueless and have not developed a personal taste, why should we care about these manufacturers? Talking about neutral in HiFi is like talking about healthy at McDonalds
@@snakeoilaudio like I said neutral is down the middle not trying to emphases details not trying to emphasise warmth colour or tonality. You can hear this difference between products fairly easily but its not always black and white. Sorry the rest is you venting a personal opinion and I think we should end the conversation there.
He was doing so well, right up until he used the word "millspec". What that word really means is "produced at the lowest cost possible by the cheapest manufacturer".
The ingenium is a ready to play turntable for £1250 thats all hand built in the same place by the same people as the more expensive offerings worth pointing out.
Beginners voor 1250 pounds…..?// what happend to rega , thorens, project audio-technica……. Come on much better prices for beginners and equal quality…. Porsche is not handmade haha
vinyl is pure shit. the more you hear it the more it gets damaged, you have to wash it well, the last few pieces feel worse because of the tracking error. 50s stuff.
@@paulhenner8914 does it really make any difference Paul as buying a CD means you own the piece of plastic the music is stored on you don’t own the music that is only licensed for you to listen to. So that is no different to having a licence to a streaming service which is a licence to listen to music when you think about it. You own a back up of the files of that is all, you can have that on a music server all the same hence cd players offer nothing as an advantage to a music server in 2024
@Eric Dual cs5000 is only belt quartz lock turntable ever made. Unfortunately the cs5000 plynth is particle board with poor rumble isolation. The Technics 1200 with upgraded tonearm is The King.
My advice is....DON'T ! Unless you have more money than sense... old flawed technology....super expensive vinyl blah blah....get a CD player or streamer.
Some of the best hifi I have ever heard was off vinyl and some of the other best was off digital. What does that tell you, it tells you both can be amazing when attentions to details are paid and that there is no need to draw a line in the sand and take an aggressive stance. Its possible to enjoy it all