I love the GPA Monaco. It is demonstrably superior to any of the crazy expensive ‘tables I’ve come into contact with, making it one of the most under-rated audio products on the market. It’s neat, petite and almost preternaturally reet. Most of which stands against it. It’s not built like an oil-rig, can be lifted by a single person and you don’t need to be an oil-rich tycoon to buy one. That big black thing that’s five times the size, five times the weight and way more than five times the price just has to be better – right? Sit the two side-by-side and you’ll be in for a shock. The problem is that customers never make the comparison, simply because the price differential is so vast.
But much as I love the Monaco, there’s one thing about it that I find hard to forgive. The direct-drive motor runs from a sophisticated but compact computer controller – a controller that’s fed from (you guessed it) a wall-wart! Okay, so it’s a carefully selected, in-line SMS – but it’s still a wall-wart. The arrival of the Monaco v3.0 finally introduced a new controller, housed in a bigger box, with the option to feed it from a matching battery power supply. But even before that, Monaco users had been looking at alternatives. For some time, while waiting for the long-rumoured but late arriving v3.0 upgrade, I’ve been running the Monaco from a 12v motorcycle battery, to considerable musical advantage. It might not be as convenient as the wall-wart (you need to keep the battery topped up to more than 70% charge or the dynamics and musical authority start to suffer) but the benefits are substantial, especially given the modest price of the battery, a decent charger and a lead to hook it up to the Monaco controller. What, I wondered, might a 12V Mini ARC6 DC4 do for the Monaco? Could it match the battery for performance and the SMS for convenience? Talking to Sean Jacobs about the possibilities he was interested in the challenge, one that broke new ground. More often than not, his power supplies find themselves feeding digital components, so a turntable would be a first, even if the turntable controller is itself digital.
While he pondered the solution, I anticipated the potential results. What I didn’t anticipate was what finally arrived. The Mini ARC6 might be twice the size of a Roon Nucleus, but it’s still relatively svelte, with its dense but compact, half-width chassis and deeper than it is wide proportions. When it arrived, I thought the package with the Monaco supply in it was a little over-sized. When I opened it, I discovered why: inside was a full-width, ARC6 DC4 supply, the model that superseded the half-width DC3. Indeed, the smaller Mini might be considered a stepping stone between the two, combining much of the circuitry and technology from the DC4, with the compact dimensions of the earlier model.
