A few months ago, a friend asked me to recommend a record player. This friend knows and loves music as much as I do; when he visits, we spend our time drinking wine and listening to records. Last time, it was Scott Walker, Fela, Joni Mitchell, Jacques Brel, Burzum, and both glorious sides of The Chronic.
“How much do you want to spend?” I asked cautiously. His answer: $500, tops.
For a sane, music-loving American, that’s a reasonable sum to allocate to buying a really good record player, way better than the ones you’ll find at big box stores or, God help us, Urban Outfitters. Yet, in the trenches of our hobby, $500 can be an awkward amount to spend on a turntable, much less an entire record playing system; it’s a price more commonly associated with a perfectionist USB cable. “Right,” I said. “Huh.”
The turntable I ended up recommending was Pro-Ject’s best seller, the Debut Carbon DC ($449). With its hefty steel platter, carbon-fiber arm, and Ortofon 2M Red cartridge, it made for an effective combination with my friend’s Bellari outboard phono preamp and Audioengine powered speakers. This compact system filled his small New York City apartment in a pleasingly fleshed-out and satisfying way, whether playing Stevie Wonder or Sibelius.
So, a few weeks later, I was suitably delighted when Pro-Ject’s follow-up to the Debut Carbon DC—the Debut Carbon EVO—arrived at my door.
Jeffrey Coates of Sumiko, Pro-Ject’s US importer, told me that part of the impetus for the EVO, which retails for $499, was an unfavorable exchange rate and production cost increases at Pro-Ject’s factory in the Czech Republic. “We hated to raise the price,” Coates told me, “so we thought hard about practical ways of upgrading the turntable with existing technologies from our more expensive models.” The EVO ended up with a new motor suspension, a heavier and better-damped platter, adjustable metal feet, and a motor-control circuit said to improve speed accuracy and stability. Instead of the Ortofon 2M Red, the new turntable comes with an installed Sumiko Rainier, a high-output moving magnet cartridge that retails for $150. As Coates told me, this was a totally different beast.
Setup
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but for me the fussiness and tedium of setting up a turntable rank somewhere between scrubbing a bathtub and doing taxes. But setting up this one turned out to be almost tedium free—following a poster-sized sheet with logical, well-illustrated instructions, I had the Debut assembled, connected, and leveled on my Box Furniture stand in about half an hour, a personal best. Someone at Pro-Ject had thought carefully about assembly and taken the time to iron out the kinks, a sign of a mature product. I checked the cartridge alignment with a Dennesen Soundtracktor. It was nearly perfect.
Much about this turntable struck me as thoughtful and cool. The carbon-fiber tonearm features a tiny screw near the base for azimuth adjustment, and I could detect no play in its synthetic sapphire bearings. The reassuring 3.75lb steel platter is damped along the outer edge with a strip of thermoplastic elastomer; watching it from the side, I could barely tell it was moving. The shielded, directional phono cable included in the box appears far more substantial than the no-frills RCA interconnect usual at this price point. And changing speeds from 33 to 45rpm—previously accomplished by removing the platter and manually moving the belt from one pulley to another—is now done with a discreetly placed three-way rocker switch.
Which brings me to my favorite, stealth feature of the Pro-Ject: a second belt that allows it to play 78rpm discs, a gift to those of us with beloved shellac collections.
As it turned out, not every kink has been ironed out. The mystifyingly short cable of the wall-wart power supply barely reached my floor, making connecting the Pro-Ject to AC power needlessly kludgy. The tonearm offers no way to adjust VTA, so changing cartridges and platter mats remains a dicey proposition. And when I first listened to the turntable, I heard a distractingly loud hum. I checked that both of the grounding spades were connected—they were—then noticed that the hum changed volume as I repositioned the phono cable, suggesting it was being affected by noise from nearby power supplies. On advice from Chris Menth, an analog specialist at Sumiko, I unplugged the Pro-Ject from my AudioQuest Niagara 1000 and plugged it into a surge protector connected to another outlet. I also ran a wire between the grounding posts on the turntable and my preamp. Both steps decreased the hum slightly but didn’t banish it. Changing to another phono cable did. Both Coates and I suspect that I received a faulty cable, and I left good enough alone.
Ready to do some listening, I beheld the EVO on its shelf; mine came in a wood-veneered plinth. To me, it looked neither beautiful nor sleek—in the low-key manner of, say, the Rega Planar 3, which I owned in various iterations for over 20 years—but rather competent and purposeful. Not to mention sane. My own turntable, a 1956 grease-bearing Garrard 301 in a Box Furniture plinth outfitted with a 12″ tonearm from Thomas Schick and an Ortofon SPU Classic G cartridge, looks and sounds wonderful but requires a high tolerance for neurosis. It is more a lifestyle than a machine. Putting it together required exotic accessories, specialized services, perusing obscure articles, and—worse—internet forums. (Restoring the Garrard, at Woodsong Audio in Idaho, cost almost twice as much as this Pro-Ject turntable.) In contrast, the Pro-Ject promises good sound while asking for very little in return: not much of your space, not much of your money, not much fuss. There’s something kind of Zen about that, or at least something Marie Kondo.
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COMPANY INFO
Pro-Ject Audio Systems
US distributor: Sumiko
(510) 843-4500
sumikoaudio.net
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Associated Equipment
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