Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

Comprising an inverted stainless steel spindle with tungsten-ceramic ball and sapphire thrust pad, the Relveo’s bearing should not require any attention – the lower bronze bushing is ‘oil impregnated for life’ and, once up to speed, this is released onto the spindle and bushing. Otherwise, the 24V motor brings the 7kg platter up to speed within 4-5secs (there’s sufficient torque to cause some initial belt slippage) but the absolute speed is within +0.08% – a fine result. Moreover, the AC drive avoids the low-rate drift still seen with DC solutions, resulting in a low peak-wtd wow of 0.03% and higher-rate flutter of 0.06%, the latter largely noise-related rather than correlated to discrete sidebands [see Graph 1]. Back to that bearing... Through-bearing rumble is low at –70.8dB (20Hz-20kHz, DIN-B wtd, re. 1kHz/5cm/sec) but improves significantly when measured through-the-groove at –73.5dB. Adding the screw-on clamp couples the LP closely to the bearing and rumble increases slightly to –72.7dB.

The partnering 9in/233mm Altus V2 tonearm is a compact but – typically for AVID – fairly ‘dense’ 680g alloy design with a slightly higher-than-average 15g effective mass that will suit most MCs as well as the ‘stiffer’ MMs that are available. The counterweight is uncalibrated but the bearings are tightly toleranced, offering very low <10mg friction with no detectable play. This straight-tubed design betrays a very simple series of resonances, beginning with a main bending mode at 115Hz and a stronger twisting/harmonic mode at 195Hz that’s most obvious on the CSD waterfall [see Graph 2, below]. The waterfall is otherwise very ‘clean’ with just a series of short-lived resonances (headshell finger lift, rear arm lift, etc) at 530Hz, 690Hz, 830Hz and 1.4kHz. PM