AW - Shindo Garrard 301

The Shindo/Garrard 301 comes with very few bells and whistles. There are no allowances for on the fly VTA adjustment, which I view as a minor inconvenience at best. After all, if you are adjusting VTA on a song by song or album by album basis, you are obviously not in this hobby to listen to music, and you probably need to get out of the house more often. The 301 also lacks a cuing device for lowering the arm to the record and for lifting it at the end of the record. I missed the cuing device at first, then don’t notice its absence again until I have a more modern table in house for reviewing.

On the other hand, the table is a breeze to set up and dial in; once set up it requires minimal maintenance. You can purchase the table without the arm and cartridge which can be purchased separately for use with other tables. The Verdier La Platine is a favorite alternative for the arm and cartridge combination. You can also have the 301 fitted to take a second arm for those of you who want to experiment with arms of different lengths and character. Frank Schroeder uses a 301 as his reference and so one particularly good match with the Shindo table likely would be his reference arm.

The real joy of the Shindo Garrard 301 is the way it sounds; and just how does it sound? In two words: right there. Not right there in the see-through ethereal, somewhat intangible sense I associate with electrostatic speakers, but right there in the palpable, immediate, at your doorstep flesh and bones sense.

Even more obvious, except that you don’t notice it, for obvious reasons – now there’s a tongue twister -- is the organic quality of the music. You don’t have to piece the parts back together to hear the music or to feel its presence. The organic nature of the presentation is part of what contributes to the right-there quality. You never have the sense that your brain is working in order to listen to the music. There is no sorting through details or piecing parts of a puzzle together to paint a musical landscape.

Together, these attributes alone make the Shindo front end the most musically persuasive turntable I have ever heard.

But what about some other tables?

When I listen to other tables, I can do so with my reviewer’s hat on. I certainly note that the Brinkmann Balance has a deeper and more authoritative bottom end than the Clearaudio Maximum Reference, which in turn has a more extended airier top end than does the Well Tempered Reference, and so on. The other tables I am familiar with line up along a continuum and along many comparable dimensions.

I find such comparisons almost unavailable and largely unhelpful when it comes to the Shindo/Garrard table. It just goes about its business in a completely different way than does the competition. It presents what’s on the grooves as a whole drawing no attention to the music’s constitutive elements but at the same time never leaving you with the impression that something has been left out or given short shrift.

If forced to make comparisons with other tables I know reasonably well and quite like, there are a few things I can say with confidence. For example, the Shindo table does not pick apart the music in the way say the Clearaudio does. With the Clearaudio you can sometimes count the number of singers in a chorus, and I am not sure you could do that with the Shindo – even if you wanted to, though with the Shindo it might never occur to you to try. Still, there is something seductive and attractive about the ability to focus and delineate images that tables like the Clearaudio possess; and I fully understand why some folks might be drawn to such attributes of reproduction. On the other hand, even if you may not be able to count the number of singers in a chorus with the Shindo, you will always hear them as a chorus, and you will be able to hear the fullness of their voices and trace its decay into a very natural background – not an infinite and empty background that leaves everything hanging as if on a thread.

With the Brinkmann Balance you will be able to plumb further depths than you will be able to do with the Shindo Garrard, but on the Shindo Garrard you will experience a resolution in the bass that is completely of a piece with the resolution elsewhere from the midrange on up. Most turntables, even really excellent ones, render the bottom end somewhat less differentiated than other parts of the musical spectrum. One rarely talks about detail in the bottom end, focusing instead on weight, authority and dynamics. Not so the Shindo Garrard which provides an extremely resolute bottom end.

Music played through the Shindo front end just fills the room with sound. In fact, it charges the room much like my recently arrived JBL Harsfields do; and like the Hartsfields, does so with no sense of strain or apparent effort.

To sum up: effortlessly dynamic, and alive; uncannily resolute from top to bottom, organic; in two words: musically compelling.

Ok, so how much is this going to cost me?

You pay a handsome price for a Shindo/Garrard 301, but no more than you would for any state of the art contemporary design. It will run you about the same as a Brinkmann, or a Simon Yorke, less than the top of the line SME or Walker. With any of these tables you get terrific performance, hand built attention to detail, years of research and development that can not be recouped in large volume sales. With the Shindo/Garrard 301, you get all this of course, and 40 or so years of experience with Garrards, EMTs and legion of other tables; a musical sensibility that is married to an engineering excellence on a par with the best of these other designers.

The Shindo/Garrard is not for everyone. It is not fidgety enough for some – it isn’t being upgraded on a weekly or monthly basis; it doesn’t allow enough adjustments for others; doesn’t sound enough like CD for others; and is just too damn old for others. And some of course may not even like the way it sounds – but to be honest with you I haven’t personally run into anyone who falls in that category yet.

In fact, in the two years I have owned the table, several audio friends have come to my home to listen to it and every one of those who can afford one has bought one. One dealer friend bought the table for himself to replace the twice as expensive and very famous if considerably less reliable table that he represents and sells.

The Shindo 301 seems to bring the best in everybody for yet another dealer who not only represents a fine line of loudspeakers but also carries a terrific table encouraged one of his customers to purchase the Shindo 301 over the table he carries and uses himself. Finally, after hearing the Shindo 301 at my home more than once, the distributor of an outstanding table that graced my listening room for months, has been looking for a way to get one for himself. I don’t think there is much more by the way of an endorsement that I can add.