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Then something happened: Audio enthusiasts with a taste for vintage gear—those willfully ignorant fools who prefer cleanly designed low-power tube amplifiers, built without a cylinder head's worth of aluminum, and very efficient, low-distortion loudspeakers—discovered that idler-drive turntables were virtually unique in their ability to reproduce music with its sense of drive and impact still intact—surely a product of those generally high-torque motors—and decided that the Garrard 301 was one of the best, if not the best, of the breed. (Its mechanically similar replacement, the 401, was even more popular.) Its high-torque AC motor and idler-wheel drive ensured the fast startups required by broadcasters, and its timeless styling and obviously high-quality construction earned it a place of honor among the hi-fi perfectionists of its day.īut when belt-drive turntables, which are cheaper to build, came into vogue, idler-drive models lost their luster—albeit not before Garrard sold an estimated 65,000 301s. It was also enduring it stayed in production through 1965. At the time of its introduction—production began in 1953—success for the British-built 301 was instant. I wasn't with this one.Ī brief recap: At the 2018 High End show in Munich, UK-based SME announced that they had taken steps to reintroduce the classic Garrard 301, a transcription turntable that's been out of production for more than half a century (footnote 1). Because I tick both boxes, and in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, I'm often a bit blasé in the face of new review samples. Some loss of innocence is expected with both age and experience.