Despite the occasional hype of the audio press, true revelatory innovations in tonearm design only come along once in a generation. In recent times, a small boutique company from England (Supatrac) unveiled its new Blackbird tonearm and the high-end audio world is slowly expressing a collective ‘Wow!’

You know that moment when you see something for the first time and are struck by its design elegance and simplicity? You think “Genius! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?”. This is one of those moments, a moment where you know this is going to change the landscape.

All pivoted arms have certain challenges, the main one being that as the record pulls the tonearm forward, the tonearm moves backwards and forwards across the pivot point which affects the accuracy of the sound in the time domain. The Supatrac arm has a patented ‘Sideways Uni-Pivot Arm’ bearing that directly opposes stylus drag at a single point of contact, eliminating microscopic play in the time axis and avoiding the scrubbing and roll movements which can degrade the performance of conventional uni-pivots and actually… all pivoted arms. The Blackbird’s SUPA bearing delivers unprecedented performance which gives the music a planted, solid, detailed, consistent sound. Due to its design, when the tonearm encounters a warped record, instead of being knocked out of the groove, the tonearm exerts a downward motion, keeping the styles tracking perfectly. This unprecedented tracking ability is part of the sonic magic that the Blackbird delivers.

When we first heard about this design, we obtained a sample and listened to it. Within a couple of minutes, we felt that this was a revelatory step forward in tonearm performance. Sometimes you don’t realise how a small aspect of the design may be degrading the sound till you hear the absence of that aspect. Then your mind adjusts and you realise that all those years you were hearing the result of those micro-movements in all those uni-pivot tonearms and it dawns on you that it is not a ‘small aspect of the design’… it’s a REALLY big deal!

A couple weeks later, we chose to match the Supatrac Blackbird Farpoint with a state-of-the-art Dohmann Audio Helix One Mk3 turntable at a show and it was a huge success. The great disparity in the pricing of the turntable and the tonearm points to the incredibly great value the Supatrac arm represents. Beyond being a mere ‘giant killer’, the Supatrac Blackbird Farpoint is one of the best tonearms available. Period. Done. Case closed.