Deceptively simple – surprisingly accomplished – remarkably musical
By Roy Gregory
I came to this Origin Live pairing in search of a musically coherent yet affordable source to sit at the front-end of serious starter systems. I cam to it straight from spending considerable time with the two finest digital replay chains currently available (the Wadax Reference DAC and Transport and the CH Precision D10 and Statement Mono DAC, in case you’re wondering). My search was driven by continuing dismay at the wider industry’s de facto acceptance of network replay as the preferred music source, despite its all too apparent and musically destructive issues. If pattern is what separates music from noise, then capturing that pattern in the recording and preserving it through the process of reproduction is fundamental to any medium and replay system that actually works. Yet despite this fundamental reality, we have seen the industry embrace a source protocol that all too often throws out the bath, the bathwater and the musical baby before the rest of the replay chain even gets a look in.
Meanwhile, we wonder why young listeners are happy with headphones and MP3 files. If we want them to engage with high-quality music reproduction, we need to show them something better than that. Fortunately, not only does that alternative exist – and exist in surprisingly affordable form – it’s actually cool! Entry level record players are capable of surprisingly musical results: results that easily eclipse not just network replay but most, affordable optical disc options too. I could have started this search at well under the thousand-pound/euro/dollar mark, but that’s not what this is about. It’s not about finding the cheapest record player that actually works. It’s all about finding out how low we can go while still maintaining or at least approaching serious hi-fi/high-end performance. Which brings me right back to musical coherence. Just as this isn’t about the lowest price, it’s not about the highest resolution, the widest bandwidth or dynamic range. It’s about balance, musical integrity and musical satisfaction. It’s about finding a record player that ticks all those boxes without costing the earth.
As a classic, light-engineering problem, record players and tonearms have always leant themselves to small-scale, artisan production – exactly the sort of set up that attracts inventive tinkerers fascinated by the intricacy and empirical nature of the challenge. It has long been one of the more fertile fields of audio exploration, although nothing quite prepares you for the creative energy that is embodied in Origin Live and its distinctive products.
Starting small…
On the surface, the Origin Live Aurora turntable presents a familiar face. A compact, platter-sized plinth, an outrigger arm-mount and a separate motor-housing: it’s a recipe that has become increasingly common, both amongst budget turntables and surprisingly expensive offerings. Of course, the devil is in the detail and, as outwardly simple as the Aurora is, like most things Origin Live, there’s a lot more than meets the eye, lurking just below the surface. Also like most things Origin Live, it’s an object lesson in value engineered solutions, solutions that often challenge conventional wisdom. It’s also the base model in a modular ladder, with the designs above sharing and building on the mechanical foundation established by the base model.
