Rob Waugh reviews the Cambridge Audio Alva TT record player

Wireless vinyl avoids the ‘fiddly stuff’ and is highly civilised. The pleasure, however, is rather pricey

Cambridge Audio Alva TT

£1500 

A fair amount of the pleasure of owning a record deck comes from being able to leave it out in your living room, showing off to visitors that you do, too, enjoy modern audio trends such as paying £20 for reissued albums you had on CD in the Eighties.

Or at least that’s my suspicion after I noticed that a few of the records my wife got for Christmas remain untouched in the cellophane.

The Cambridge Audio Alva TT is a hefty £1,500 (although the metal unit is very strokable)

So the new Alva TT record deck from British hi-fi stalwarts Cambridge Audio has a purpose in life: it’s a deck built to sit out on its own, without having to teeter on top of a stack of amps.

It’s the first vinyl deck equipped with AptX HD Bluetooth, which sounds far, far better than normal Bluetooth – so you can transmit sound wirelessly to speakers, or (better still) to a pair of wireless headphones, and enjoy proper hi-fi sound.

There’s not too much difference using this wired or wireless, which is a big leap forward for Bluetooth decks.

It’s a departure for Cambridge, which is best known for its ‘sensible’ (if slightly beige) mid-priced audio. This is a hefty £1,500 (although the metal unit is very strokable).

It’s a ‘proper’ direct-drive turntable (ie it’s not driven by a belt, like most cheaper ones) and also comes with its own phono amp and cartridge.

And you skip out a lot of the fiddly stuff that’s normally standard with vinyl, such as selecting cartridges, buying extra amps and cursing the day you decided to stop just listening to your phone.

The sound’s fantastic – AptX HD really is an enormous leap forward for wireless sound, as long as your speakers or headphones can handle it. Listening via wireless headphones feels enormously civilised. But as with so much with the vinyl revival, it’s a rather pricey pleasure.

 

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