The new Garrard 301
Some loss of innocence is expected with both age and experience. Because I tick both boxes, and in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, I’m often a bit blasé in the face of new review samples. I wasn’t with this one.
A brief recap: At the 2018 High End show in Munich, UK-based SME announced that they had taken steps to reintroduce the classic Garrard 301, a transcription turntable that’s been out of production for more than half a century. At the time of its introduction—production began in 1953—success for the British-built 301 was instant. It was also enduring; it stayed in production through 1965. Its high-torque AC motor and idler-wheel drive ensured the fast startups required by broadcasters, and its timeless styling and obviously high-quality construction earned it a place of honor among the hi-fi perfectionists of its day.
But when belt-drive turntables, which are cheaper to build, came into vogue, idler-drive models lost their luster—albeit not before Garrard sold an estimated 65,000 301s. (Its mechanically similar replacement, the 401, was even more popular.)
Then something happened: Audio enthusiasts with a taste for vintage gear—those willfully ignorant fools who prefer cleanly designed low-power tube amplifiers, built without a cylinder head’s worth of aluminum, and very efficient, low-distortion loudspeakers—discovered that idler-drive turntables were virtually unique in their ability to reproduce music with its sense of drive and impact still intact—surely a product of those generally high-torque motors—and decided that the Garrard 301 was one of the best, if not the best, of the breed. Prices of old 301s began to poke through the cloud cover, and a cottage industry formed around the restoration of old 301s and the making of compatible plinths.
It was into this world that SME, in the person of Ajay Shirke—a noted record collector who is also the chairman of the Cadence Group, which owns SME and other audio brands—dropped their 2018 bombshell. Some of us were excited. Others wondered how the 301’s reintroduction would affect those whose livelihoods depend, at present, on the demand for restoring and maintaining existing samples. Still others reacted with the sort of belligerence one sees in film clips from group would now belong to the world.
