HiFiction Thales TTT-Slim II/Simplicity II
Money, that unreliable buyer of happiness, has at times proven effective at delivering good sound. It can buy other things, as well: Audiophiles can swap cash for products that function as objets d’art, as status symbols, or even as canny investments.
But—do you think money can buy peace of mind for the audio enthusiast who frets over binding voice-coils, leaking capacitors, drifting resistor values, oxidizing connectors, aging or incorrectly biased tubes, and that most pernicious worry of all, distortion and premature record wear from incorrectly aligned phono cartridges? Sadly, most of those neuroses, some quite reasonable, remain unaddressed by cash almighty.
Early attempts at solving that last one had promise but failed to deliver. That’s been especially true of straight-line tracking tonearms, which look good in theory but often wind up torqueing the phono-cartridge cantilever to an extent that compromises the newfound tangency and stresses the poor thing’s suspension—one step forward toward peace of mind, two steps back toward audiophile angst. A different path was taken by proponents of the pivoting tangential-tracking tonearm, as originated with the Garrard Zero 100 record player of the 1970s, but that example was compromised by less-than-perfectionist levels of engineering and build quality, not to mention a mindset that disregarded the deleterious effects of resonances and microrattling.
Pivoting tangential-trackers are once again appearing in showrooms and at shows, none more than those sold under the name Thales, designed by engineer and former watchmaker Micha Huber and manufactured by Swiss company HiFiction. At this writing, there are no fewer than three Thales tonearms—Michael Fremer wrote about their top-of-the-line Statement tonearm ($21,090) in the May 2019 —and two similarly distinctive Thales turntables to support them. Earlier this year, Huber sent me the combination of Thales TTT-Slim II turntable (at $6750, the least expensive of his two models) and Simplicity II tonearm (at $9450, in the middle of the
