It came as no surprise that the Model 60 from venerable British company SME won this category.

SME’s new flagship record player is based on 1990’s Model 30 turntable but with the latter’s DC motor replaced by an AC synchronous motor and everything else massed out and fully optimized. The tonearm is based on SME’s Model V, which was originally reviewed in Stereophile’s September 1986 issue but is still in production.

The VA replaces that tonearm’s cast-magnesium-alloy armtube with one machined in-house from a solid block of polymer resin. Michael Trei found that the Model 60 was exceptionally quiet. ‘How much of that is due to the VA arm and how much to the new motor drive and the more massive chassis isn’t entirely clear,’ he wrote, ‘but the 60/VA manages to stay out of the way of the music more emphatically than the 30/Series V combination.’

MT concluded that with the Model 60, ‘SME has managed to raise the bar to what can be achieved with their design philosophy… This turntable is capable of extracting an astonishing amount of music from the record grove. It should be considered the new real-world reference against which other turntables can be judged.’

Stereophile Product of the Year, December 2023

Click here to read the original review.