2023 Golden Ear: Acoustic Signature Invictus Neo Turntable and TA-9000 Neo Tonearm

REVIEW
by Jonathan Valin
Apr 26, 2024

$199,995, turntable; $27,995, tonearm

The Acoustic Signature Neo turntable and tonearm are, as their name says (“Neo” is ancient Greek for “new”), genuinely new and magically improved. Why magically? Because after living for almost a decade with their predecessors, the Invictus and the Invictus, Jr., I wouldn’t have thought such a major advancement in LP playback was possible. After all, the Invictus/TA-9000 and its young heir were the best turntable/pivoted-tonearm combos I’d heretofore had in-house. They were massive, of course (and that hasn’t changed). And they were ultra-expensive (and now are considerably more so). But they were also the quietest record players I’d heard, and I’ve heard a lot of record players. Well, here we are, eight years down the road, and Acoustic Signature’s Neos have astounded me all over again. You not only hear considerably more of everything that matters through them; you also hear considerably less of everything that doesn’t. Dressed out with a DS Audio Grand Master EX cartridge, the Invictus Neo ‘table and TA-9000 Neo tonearm just don’t sound as if they are “there” in the way that every other turntable/tonearm I’m familiar with does to some extent. The RFI, the EMI, the jittery mechanical noises of all those moving parts grinding against one another—which, among other things, tend to flatten body, smear tone color (particularly in the bass), blur detail (ditto), and, with their added emphases on starting transients, make dynamic changes sound sharp and “step-like” rather than smooth and ramp-like—simply aren’t there anymore. As with the MBL 101 X-treme MKII, you must hear (or not hear) this to believe it. (And those of you with deep pockets and a large LP collection really do have to hear it.) Even though the original Invicti strongly reminded me of 15ips tape playback, the Neos come so much closer to that paragon of smooth, solid, continuous, organic high fidelity that it’s amazing. (339)

Tags: ANALOG AWARD GOLDEN EAR TONEARM TURNTABLE

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.