Review: Tim Jarman

The Braun PS 500 could be the best turntable you’ve never heard of. Introduced in 1968 and styled by Dieter Rams, it was Braun’s top model and the latest in a long line of similar machines which had been slowly developing and improving since the start of the decade. Unlike the later PS 450 [HFN Apr ’25], the PS 500 was very much an in-house affair, entirely designed and produced by Braun itself. This may come as a surprise to those who now mainly associate the manufacturer with alarm clocks, razors and electric toothbrushes.

The Pye Black Box hi-fi record player was a milestone design which seems to have touched the lives of everyone involved in audio from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s. It arrived at a time when quality listening was becoming a pursuit in itself but much of the equipment on the market was too complicated for the non-technically minded user. The Black Box, on the other hand, made everything simple – all you had to do was to put it somewhere, plug it in and off it went. At a time when even FM radio was a thing of the future its performance was a revelation. If you were a music lover who wanted something small and neat you simply had to have one.

There is always some kind of surprise in store when reviewing vintage Philips products. Whether a new way of doing things or an extra feature you never knew you needed, Philips always had a knack for this sort of thing. The GA 209S seen here was an attempt to completely automate a high-quality turntable. Introduced in 1973, it entered a market where the grinding gears, clicking cams and greasy levers found in the mechanisms of some BSR and Garrard decks were still very much the norm. The Philips approach was quite different; it made extensive use of electronics to control and sequence the mechanism.

Aiwa’s 30 series micro system [HFN Dec ’24] was a fine example of the Japanese urge to miniaturise familiar objects to make them even more desirable to the consumer. It was part of the Micro Systems craze that swept through the hi-fi industry in the late 1970s and early ’80s, in which most of the major manufacturers got involved. Amplifiers, tuners and tape decks were shrunk to an impressive degree, but one key part of the hi-fi chain presented more of a challenge. The turntable, effectively dimensioned by the size of the records it played, was difficult to make any smaller without losing functionality and quality.