Turntable £49,950
The Scale Model Equipment Company was founded by Alastair Robertson-Aikman in 1946. It initially designed and manufactured high-quality scale models for the exhibition and model engineering trade. Over time, the work expanded to the aerospace industry, with precision parts made for the likes of Rolls-Royce, Hawker and Martin Baker. The brand continues to cater for different industries to this day, with clients from the medical industry, Formula One and aerospace among others.
It wasn’t until 1959 that SME made its first hi-fi product, the Series 1 tonearm. This arm was originally something that Robertson-Aikman designed for his own use, but such was the reaction from friends in the audio industry that he decided to put it into production. The Series 1 arm proved so successful that a new factory was built to cope with the demand and even the company name was changed to SME to reflect the changing manufacturing output.
It may surprise many to learn that the brand’s first turntable wasn’t made until 1991. That was the mighty Model 30, which still remains in the current line-up. It’s some testament to the Model 30’s design that it has remained the company’s flagship turntable, essentially unchanged, for more than 30 years. That’s how SME tends to operate; it doesn’t launch many new products, but when it does they are obsessively engineered and then usually stay in production for decades.
PRECISION MACHINED
This naturally conservative nature is very much in evidence with the new range-topping Model 60, an evolution of the original flagship deck that follows the same engineering principles but takes advantage of modern production techniques and materials where they are deemed desirable.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the new SME 5A tonearm. This is an update of a long-running favourite that was first introduced in 1984. The ‘A’ stands for ‘advanced’ and swaps the original’s tapered magnesium armtube with one that is machined from a block of high-tech polymer resin. The rest of the arm’s structure is unchanged from the standard version. It’s interesting to note that the original SME 5 tonearm remains in production.
Examine the 5A’s armtube in cross-section and it looks like a Reuleaux triangle (a triangle with curved sides). It’s a shape SME has chosen in order to improve rigidity. The move to a well-damped material such as this resin is a bid to reduce armtube resonances to a minimum. As is SME’s current policy, it’s not possible to buy the arm separately. SME doesn’t make cartridges, so our deck was supplied with a
