The High End trade fair has been over for a few weeks, and some things at the fair made a lasting impression on us.

This includes the most original tonearm we have ever come across.

The device, named after its designer, is called the Thiele TA01, and is intended to eliminate a cardinal problem in analog record scanning: the tangential tracking error.

For the younger ones among us: When cutting the sound grooves in the lacquer foil, i.e. in a pre-product in the production of records, the cutting stylus moves in a straight line in the direction of the axis of rotation.

The ideal turntable would guide the pickup system in the same way, but most models use pivoting tonearms that force the cartridge to follow a different path, namely an arc of a circle.

This results in the error angle: the stylus is more or less inclined in the sound groove almost the entire way over the record, so it does not scan the two groove flanks at exactly the same time.

The ear can hear it - for example in the form of errors in spatial representation.

HiFi history has produced a number of refinements to minimize the tangential tracking error;

this includes cranking the tonearm tube. Meticulous instructions for adjusting the pickup also help

Look like vibrating guitar strings

But Helmut Thiele, industrial designer and developer for the Thorens brand for ten years, wanted to get to the root of the problem.

Did he overlook the fact that there have long been tried and tested solutions in the form of tangential tonearms, which let their pickups slide down a straight tube to the center of the record?

Thiele knows them all, and sees all of them as problems that are difficult to control: guiding the pickup in this way as smoothly as possible and still preventing it from any movement of its own is no trivial task.

So he chose a different path.

As early as the 1950s, there were tonearm designs consisting of two parallel extension arms that moved with four pivot points like in a parallelogram and varied the offset angle of the tonearm head in such a way that

But such solutions were out of the question for other reasons: Thiele demanded firm connections between the tonearm tube and the tonearm head;

that's why they don't believe in the widespread screw connections.

He finds joints near the stylus all the more out of the question.

In addition: The ideal tonearm tube is light and completely rigid;

a long twin arm offers too high a risk of interfering with the music with its own vibrations.

Thiele can visualize such behavioral patterns with laser scans.

Make tonearm tubes, he says, look like vibrating guitar strings in stroboscopic displays.

So the designer moved his parallelogram backwards near the base of the tonearm.

A solid base made of light metal, the tonearm tube and two control levers made of ebony form the four sides of this geometric figure, whose angles deviate somewhat from the parallelogram shape.

These peculiarities are the result of optimization processes that Thiele carried out on the computer: he could not do his job without CAD technology.

In any case, he can report a record value in the world of rotary tonearms: his data sheets state a maximum error angle of 0.036 degrees.

The price?

five digits