Thales

Thales builds its tonearms, turntables, cartridges, and phono electronics in Winterthur, Switzerland, where founder and engineer Micha Huber has been working on a single problem since 2005: how to track a record groove the way the engineer who cut it intended, with a pivoted tonearm a customer can actually live with. The answer is geometry. The patented Thales Circle, and now the Tetragon, are linkage systems that hold the cartridge almost perfectly tangent to the groove across the entire record — reducing tracking error in the Statement tonearm to 0.006°, a figure conventional pivoted arms cannot approach. The result is the kind of clarity the analog listener expects from tangential tracking, in a tonearm that does not depend on an air pump and does not change as it ages.

Two decades on, the lineup is the most complete expression of that engineering thesis: the flagship Reference turntable; the compact Elegance; three tonearms (Statement, Simplicity II, EASY) that step through the Tetragon family at different effective masses; the Magnifier reference phono stage, born from a collaboration with Stellavox and built around an open-loop Class A DC amplifier with RIAA equalization via ironless inductors rather than capacitors; the Xquisite and VORO cartridge families, each evolved through years of in-house listening; and the Silencer record clamp, where a hollow aluminum body filled with bronze spheres holds the record flat through a wafer-thin silicone membrane. Hundreds of individually machined parts. Assembled by hand. Designed by people who treat analog playback as a mechanical engineering discipline first, and a marketing one not at all.

Alma Music and Audio is an authorized Thales dealer. Visit our showrooms in San Diego, CA or Sterling, VA to listen for yourself.