Reed 5T Tonearm

The 5T is Reed's flagship tonearm and a quiet answer to one of the oldest problems in vinyl reproduction. A record was cut by a tangential cutting head moving in a straight line across the lacquer. A standard pivoted tonearm cannot reproduce that motion — it traces an arc, and the angle between the stylus and the groove walls changes with every millimeter of travel. The tracking error is small, but it is constant, and it is the reason a serious analog listener will sooner or later wonder what they could hear without it.

The 5T is a pivoted arm that tracks tangentially. It does this with no air bearing, no compressor in the next room, no electronic servo controlling its position, and a footprint not much larger than a conventional 9-inch arm. The solution is geometric — a particular three-point arrangement, drawn from a classical theorem about right triangles inscribed in a circle, that constrains the cartridge's path to within minutes of arc of a true tangent. The maximum tracking error across the playing surface is roughly five minutes of angle. A standard pivoted arm carries one or two degrees of error at the same point on the record. This is the difference between a curve fitted to a line and the line itself.

The consequences are quiet, and they are everywhere. There is no need for anti-skating force, because there is no skating force to counter — the arm is in equilibrium against the groove at every point. The moment of inertia is meaningfully lower than other tangential designs, which means the arm follows a warped record by lifting and dropping with the warp rather than by fighting it. The effective mass is balanced between the vertical and horizontal axes, which means a cartridge sees the same arm whether it is dealing with bass modulation or sibilance. The structure is compact enough to mount on a turntable that was never designed with a tangential arm in mind.

What this produces in the room is a quality the analog listener associates with the very best front ends and assumes is the result of a much larger investment. Stereo image is solid across the soundstage; the inner detail of an orchestral chord does not collapse into a single tone; the high end is not lit by the tracking imperfection that ordinarily lives at the inner grooves of a record. The 5T tracks the record the way the record was cut.

Three body finishes are offered — seashell white, black, and a hand-finished gold matte at the top of the range. Six armwands are offered: wenge, teak in two shades, macassar ebony, cocobolo at the standard price, and the dense panzerholz at the top of the wood range. The wand is selected with the cartridge in mind; effective mass spans roughly 8 to 18 grams across the range, which means the 5T is a natural partner for cartridges from medium-high compliance through to the heaviest low-compliance moving coils.

The 5T is built one at a time at the Reed workshop. Each arm ships with the dedicated BS-12V battery power supply that drives the integrated motor for the tangential mechanism; the supply removes any influence the wall current might otherwise have over the arm's behavior. Setup at the customer's turntable is part of the Alma delivery for any 5T sold in the showrooms' service area. Available at both Alma showrooms by appointment for private audition.