Thorens TD 550
The TD 550 is Thorens' flagship turntable of the modern era, and the surviving record on it is thinner than the machine warrants. The most substantial document is a review in Hi-Fi News (October 2018). It tested the deck at from £6,975 and called it massive, luxurious, and very much the old-school idea of what a top-of-the-line record player should be.
That review sample carried the TP 125 Special Edition - an anniversary model - made for Thorens by Da Vinci of Switzerland. It has a carbon-fibre tube and jewelled gimbal bearings of the sort found in fine Swiss clock movements. Hi-Fi News noted that there is no azimuth adjustment. It found the thread-and-weight bias compensation fussier than the magnetic bias device shown on Thorens' website, but still judged the arm genuinely simple to set up and a pleasure to use. The plinth has a polished metal front plate with minimal controls: power, start/stop, and 33/45 rpm buttons, plus a blue-lit Thorens logo whose brightness can be adjusted. The deck uses a subchassis construction, and the product documentation describes a powerful DC motor driving an aluminium-and-vinyl platter chosen for its damping. A dealer listing calls the TD 550 Thorens' top product - "the new benchmark," in that dealer's words. It was offered with several Ortofon and SME tonearms, including an SME 309 version, and fitted with both RCA and balanced XLR outputs, the latter being a rarity among phono stages. The same listing shows the model is now discontinued.
Beyond that, the documented record thins quickly. No production years, dimensions, weight, or conventional measurements such as wow/flutter and rumble have surfaced in the archive's sources. What does exist: a 2008 6moons.com review that earned a Blue Moon Award, a 2009 review in the Italian publication Audio Review no. 297 (issued in English and Italian), a user manual available in English, and at least one aftermarket dust cover listed for the TD 550 alongside the TD 350 and TD 900. How it actually sounded, in any detail, remains largely undocumented.
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