Over One Million Tonearms Sold Worldwide

In 1959 Alastair Robertson-Aikman designed a pick up arm for his hi-fi system and on seeing the prototype friends in the audio industry encouraged him to produce it commercially. It was received with such enthusiasm that a new factory was built to meet the demand and the company’s name was changed to SME Limited to suit its new activities.

Over the next thirty years teams of top-flight engineers, machinists, and production managers refined tonearm design and improved SME’s precision engineering capabilities. Today SME owns some of the most sophisticated equipment on the planet and manufacturers highly complex precision components for world leaders like: Rolls Royce, Ford Motor, Philips Medical and Williams Motorsport. SME’s unique skill, experience and commitment to excellence has been recognized by music lovers the world over and as a result SME has sold over 1,000,000 tonearms! Visit an Authorized SME dealer and experience SME for yourself.

Series M2

The Series M2 embraces four models the M2-9, M2-9R, M2-12 and M2-12R offering pivot-stylus dimensions covering virtually all turntable requirements. These arms offer at reasonable cost, meticulous build quality with all the most important features including lightweight stainless steel tonearm, detachable magnesium headshell with azimuth adjustment, tungsten balance weight, superb quality ball race bearings etc., and a level of stiffness and rigidity to suit all types of cartridge. These precision pick-up arms embody well tried SME principles and are suited to a broad range of cartridges including those of medium and low compliance.  Click here for details and pricing.

Series 300

The Series 300 broadens the application of SME technology. A one piece magnesium tone arm, available as Model 309 and Model 310. The detachable magnesium headshell has a new style coupling, providing the convenience of rapid cartridge interchange without loss of rigidity. Our designers can be justly proud of these models which offer a performance and manufacturing excellence unmatched by many more expensive models.

Series 312

The Model 312S precision pick-up arm is an extension of the popular Series 300 range designed with maximizing performance and ease of use in mind. It has a detachable magnesium headshell to provide the convenience of rapid cartridge interchange while maintaining a degree of rigidity normally only associated with arms of one piece design. The 12 inch magnesium construction takes advantage of the reduction in maximum tracking error/distortion afforded by the greater arm length when compared with 9 inch models.

Series V

SME engineers, recognizing the potential of the latest complementary equipment, accepted the challenge to design and build a pick-up arm which unlike others in existence would make no detectable sound contribution of its own. The work took almost four years and the measure of its success is the acceptance of the Series V precision pick-up arm by technical experts and users as one of the world’s truly great audio products. Series V sound has an almost startling dynamic range and neutrality enabling high levels to be enjoyed. It escapes the ‘LP’ sound and demonstrates that structural resonances in pick-up arms are responsible for much that makes vinyl records readily discernible from master tapes.

Series V-12

Based on the multi-award winning Series V pick-up arm, the Series V-12 incorporates the same design and engineering that have made SME a byword for excellence. Coherent musical control is held over the entire frequency range in terms of tonal quality, stability and stereo imaging. Startling dynamic range, neutrality, structurally inert, the Series V-12 embodies every worthwhile feature in a pick-up arm. The 12 inch tone-arm is pressure die-cast in magnesium complete with an integrated headshell to eliminate tone-arm resonances in the audio spectrum and offers a 27% reduction in maximum angular error distortion over 9 inch models. Listening: the benefits of minimal tracking error and harmonic distortion are clearly revealed.

The M2 Series tonearms: M2-9, M2-9R, M2-12 and M12-R are available for sale individually.
The other SME tonearms are sold only with SME turntables.

Click here for details and pricing on Series M2 tonearms.