31 July 2026
Lees dit bericht in het Nederlands
Most progress in analogue playback is refinement: a better bearing here, a heavier platter there. Every so often someone goes back to first principles instead. Supatrac and Korf Audio are two such companies, and we carry both.
They arrive at the same place from opposite directions. Supatrac found a mechanical idea nobody had had. Korf measured everything until the numbers told them what to build. Between them they cover almost every way you can meaningfully improve a record player, from a €199 headshell to a tonearm that has embarrassed arms costing ten times as much.
Supatrac Blackbird. A bearing nobody had thought of.
The problem is old and well understood. As the stylus tracks the groove it drags on the arm, and that drag is not constant: it rises and falls with the music. In a conventional pivoted arm those oscillating forces act across the bearing and produce microscopic play in exactly the axis where it does most damage, which is time. The result is a smearing the industry has largely learned to live with and call character.
The Sideways Uni-Pivot Arm (SUPA) is a UK-patented bearing that lays the unipivot on its side, so its single point of contact opposes stylus drag head-on instead of sitting at right angles to it. Because the pivot sits just below record level, a burst of drag produces a small downward torque, so the arm presses into the groove precisely when the music demands it. Supatrac calls this Torque-Reaction-Assisted Contact.
That is the theory. What you hear is simpler to describe: transients that start and stop without hesitation, and a composure on heavily modulated passages that makes most arms sound as though they are negotiating with the record rather than reading it.
Why we think the Blackbird is the best value in high-end analogue.
The Blackbird Farpoint took a Golden Ear Award from The Absolute Sound in 2024. Michael Fremer’s review compared roughly $7,500 of arm and cartridge against $83,000 of arm and cartridge and published the files so readers could judge for themselves; his conclusion was that the Blackbird is not ‘better for the money’, but just startlingly better
. Roy Gregory reached a similar verdict at Gy8, and Chris Beeching gave it five stars at The Ear.
Set that against the price. The 9″ Blackbird is €4,600. The arms it is routinely compared with start at three times that and run well past ten. And the Blackbird is not a special-case product: it fits almost anything, including Linn, Rega, Technics, Garrard and SME, in 9″, 10.5″ or 12″, Baerwald or Stevenson, with custom lengths on request. Effective mass is around 10 g, and a mass adaptor is supplied, so cartridge matching runs from high-compliance MMs to low-compliance MCs. The arm tube is pultruded carbon fibre reinforced with aluminium and damped internally. Internal wiring is designed to be replaced. Five-year warranty.
Every arm is built by hand in England, so lead times run into months. The 9″ Blackbird is in stock now, which for a Supatrac is unusual and will not last.
- Supatrac Blackbird 9″ tonearm, €4,600 · in stock
- Supatrac Blackbird 10.5″ tonearm, €5,100
- Supatrac Blackbird 12″ tonearm, €5,600
Two Blackbirds on demonstration.
Both are set up and playing. A Blackbird sits on a 1964 Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference, and a 10.5″ Blackbird is mounted on a Garrard 401. Two very different decks, sixty years old between them, and a good way to hear what the arm itself contributes.
Korf Audio. Materials and measurement.
Alexey Korf has the opposite temperament. No single conceptual leap. Instead, dozens of headshells and tonearms measured on a test bench until two properties emerged as the reliable predictors of sound quality: rigidity in bending and torsion, and how quickly a structure stops ringing. Then he built to those numbers, at prices that suggest he is more interested in the engineering than the margin.
The simplest real upgrade a Technics owner can make.
The HS-A03 ceramic headshell is the clearest demonstration of the idea, and the easiest thing on this page to recommend.
It is a single seamless casting of alumina ceramic: shell and connector in one piece, no joints, no glued-in inserts, no mixed materials, with an internal rib that breaks up what resonance remains. It measures two to three times stiffer than the next best headshell Korf tested, at 13 grams complete with pure silver litz wiring and finger lift. The connector barrel is machined tightly enough that it needs no elastic washer, and on most headshells that washer is doing real damage to a signal still measured in microvolts.
It fits any tonearm that takes a standard SME / Ortofon / JIS straight headshell, which means every Technics with a removable headshell: the SL-1200 you have owned since the eighties, an SL-1200G, an SL-1210GAE, an SL-1300G, or the SL-1000R. For a Technics owner this is the highest return per euro available anywhere in the system. €199, ten minutes to fit, and nothing else on the deck needs to change. The Absolute Sound listed the previous version among its recommended products under $1,000. Owners tend to describe the same thing: the top end opens, the bass firms up, and a layer of haze you had stopped noticing is simply gone.
Korf headshells are in stock.
- Korf Audio HS-A03 ceramic headshell, €199 · in stock
- Korf Audio CB-A01 ceramic cartridge spacer, €49
- Korf Audio TC-125 Series II tonearm cable, €105
And the tonearms.
The same thinking, scaled up. Korf arms use aerospace flexure bearings with zero stiction in the horizontal plane, stainless steel or alumina ceramic arm tubes, magnetic anti-skating and fine VTA adjustment throughout. The TA-SF9 starts at €2,200; the ceramic-tubed TA-AF9/10 Series II at €3,800; the sapphire TA-CF9/10 at €5,200. Three-year warranty.
Worth watching.
If you want to hear people who actually design this equipment argue about where the remaining gains in record playback are, this panel discussion moderated by Michael Fremer is a good use of an evening: Frontiers in Modern Groove Extraction.
Come and listen.
Both brands are here in Buggenhout and both are set up for comparison. A headshell swap is the kind of thing you can hear inside thirty seconds. Bring your own records, and your own cartridge if you like.
