2024 Golden Ear: Supatrac Blackbird Farpoint Tonearm

$5000/$6000 (9″/12″)

A tonearm that breaks price/performance-ratio standards, design innovation rules, and set-up peculiarities. Once heard, you’ll never forget the newness and bold musical deliverance it extracts from the grooves of your most familiar records. The Blackbird employs a horizontally oriented unipivot bearing parallel to the record that works with and not at 90-degree opposition to the stylus’ groove travel. The setup is in some ways “el primitivo”—for instance the counterweight is a rectangular magnet hanging from a fixed “thrust box” that you slide fore and aft and left and right to set both tracking force and azimuth—but once you get the “hang” of it and hear the results, you won’t care. And the price could rightly be described as 1/10^th of the delivered performance. For once, the over-the-top unanimous reviews are correct. They result from a “heard” not a “herd” mentality. (Forthcoming)