Turntables, Arms & Cartridges

ELAC has successfully evolved to reflect the pace of change throughout its 90+ year history but the last few years has witnessed an atypical amount of ‘behind-the-scenes’ activity. First signs of ELAC’s expansion into new territories came with the appointment of Andrew Jones [pictured] in 2015, a Brit based in California and formerly both the face and engineering powerhouse behind the Japanese TAD brand. Andrew oversaw the design and introduction of ELAC’s EISA award-winning Debut speaker range [HFN May ’16] and, more recently, the new Adante series [HFN Feb ’18]. Meanwhile, ELAC Americas Inc. was set up to help facilitate products better suited to the US market, with engineering resources in the Far East and North America leveraged to produce new digital/streaming products, including the Discovery [HFN Dec ’16]. More recently, Peter Madnick’s Audio Alchemy range [HFN Jan ’16, Aug ’16 and Jan ’17] was acquired to give ELAC an instant audiophile foothold in the US. Rebranded as the ELAC Alchemy range and re-engineered into slimmer, standard-width cases, the amplifier is now more powerful, and bridgeable, while the preamp and phono stage now include built-in rather than outboard PSUs. PM