stereophile.com n August2019 79
HIFICTION THALES TTT-SLIM II/SIMPLICITY IItonearm on my vintage TD
124 turntable.^2 I have now
handled, adjusted, and just
plain used virtually every ele-
ment of these two products,
and I have to say this: In
34 years of writing about
playback gear, I have seen
no products better made
than the Thales turntable
and tonearm, and precious
few—the TD 124 comes to mind—that equal
them. Indeed, to merely handle the Simplic-
ity II tonearm—to note how utterly free of
friction yet also how solid, smooth, and free
of play its bearings are—left me in awe of
its manufacturing quality. And although I’m
far from obsessed over VTA adjustments, I
couldn’t help being impressed by how easy it was to adjust
arm height. Again, this is accomplished in the same manner
as any number of other tonearms of my experience—yet to
a one, all are downright crude compared to the way this has
been executed on the Simplicity II.Listening to the TTT-Slim II/Simplicity II combination
If only because the Thales record player was so different
from my own—small instead of large, new instead of vin-
tage, DC instead of AC, low-torque instead of high-torque—
I was a bit startled by how well it performed in many of the
performance aspects that are most important to me: color,
drive, momentum, sheer juice. I prejudged and came away
shocked. There it is.
The Thales combo, equipped with an EMT TSD 15 N
SPH cartridge (the standard-mount version of the TSD 15
pickup head), played Sonny Rollins’s “Without a Song,”
from The Bridge (RCA/Japan Victor RCA-6011), like some-
body’s life depended on it: The music lost not one iota of its
bounce in the translation from my Garrard 301-based player
to this one. And I was especially pleased that Bob Cran-
shaw’s double bass sounded no less full, and no less snappy,
than via my reference player, although the Thales combo
lacked the vintage rig’s sense of impact.
But there was more to it than that. In “Without a Song,”
during his last break before the bass solo, Rollins plays back-
to-back triplets that swim against the song’s rhythmic stream
in a manner I’m unable to describe. The Thales player nailed
it, just as well as I’m used to hearing from my Garrard (and
few others). And in the comparatively pensive “Where Are
You,” each one of guitarist Jim Hall’s luxuriantly arpeg-
giated chords was a pure, tactile delight. Tactile goodness
also characterized the piano sound on Herbie Hancock’s
debut album, Takin’ Off (Blue Note/Cisco 84109), especially
Hancock’s solo on “Three Bags Full.”through a channel machined
for that purpose, which
leads to the onboard drive
circuitry and battery pack:
Although it’s connected to
the user’s household AC
when its Li-Ion batteries
need charging—a running
time of 20 hours is speci-
fied—the external charger
is claimed to be electri-
cally separate from the drive
circuitry when the turntable
is switched on. That said, in
order to prevent any electri-
cal emissions from polluting
playback, howsoever slight-
ly, HiFiction recommends
disconnecting the charger
when it isn’t needed, thus
keeping the Slim II off the
grid during playback.
The platter bearing has
a well of ductile iron, lined
with a sintered bronze bushing that’s said to be saturated
with oil during a heated soaking process, guaranteeing
maintenance-free operation “for many decades.” The bear-
ing shaft is made of hardened tool steel, hand-polished with
basswood and diamond paste. The 7.7lb platter, machined
with a heavy rim to maximize inertial mass, is said to be
tuned to one single resonant frequency, then fitted with an
inlaid record mat of an unspecified high-density material. (It
looks and feels a little like lead, but I’m sure that’s not so.)
The final contributor to the Slim II’s performance is a trio
of isolation feet: smallish, height-adjustable fittings in which
the contact elements—steel balls—are centered with pliant
rubber fittings. The manufacturer suggests that these “spikes”
effectively isolate the turntable from horizontal vibrations.
Installation and setup
My review sample of the TTT-Slim II/Simplicity II com-
bination was installed in my system, with all apparent skill,
by Wynn Wong of HiFiction’s North American distributor,
Wynn Audio. That being said, the Thales turntable and
tonearm, not to mention their well-executed packaging,
seem to have been designed to ensure both ease of setup
and consistently precise results.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Plexiglas-
and-aluminum cartridge-alignment jig—in their very good
manual, HiFiction refers to this as a sight unit^1 —supplied
with the Simplicity II: To avoid compromising the arm’s
articulating headshell, the design requires that cartridges be
mounted on a small aluminum plate that can, more or less
quickly and easily, be removed from that headshell, to which
it’s locked with a single 0.9mm setscrew. The Thales sight-
unit is itself made with a recess into which the cartridge and
plate fit—perfectly—and has sight-lines that enable unambigu-
ously correct positioning of the cantilever and stylus. I was
impressed that HiFiction invested the effort and care to cre-
ate such a tool. To borrow a phrase from a soap commercial
of yore, Don’t you wish everybody did?
In the weeks following Wynn Wong’s setup, I disas-
sembled the player in part, mostly just to see what makes it
tick. And well into the review, I installed the Simplicity II
The Thales Simplicity II
is nothing less than the
most well-made tonearm
I’ve ever used.1 The Thales sight unit is reminiscent of, if much more sophisticated than, the
clear-plastic cartridge-alignment jig supplied with the Thorens TD 145 record
player I bought new in 1975. This was meant to be slipped over the tonearm’s
headshell and required the user to shim the cartridge, sometimes drastically, in
compensation for the player’s frustratingly non-height-adjustable tonearm.
2 That one was a second sample, which HiFiction kindly dispatched to my home.Hereonecanseetheprecisefitbe-
tweentheSimplicityII’sarticulated
headshellandthecartridge-mount-
ingplatethatfastenstoit.Thelatter
hasaslightlyblueranodicfinish.