“…Rotel’s RP-955 is one such new design. Like most Rotel products the RP-955 is aimed squarely at the market’s bulging midsection, where it competes with similar tables from Dual, NAD, Pro-Ject, and, especially, the wildly popular Rega Planar 3 (which just happens to sell for exactly the same price in Canada). Like most of its immediate competition the Rotel is an unsuspended, belt-drive table which comes packaged with a dedicated arm and cartridge….”

“Outboard phono preamplifiers are becoming a necessity for vinyl lovers trading up their systems because few current preamplifiers contain phono stages. Virtually all of these take the signal from its beginning right to line level, unlike many moving coil stepup devices, and the Linto is no exception, with 64 dB of gain. Cutting an internal wire reduces this to 54 dB in cases where the MC output is unusually high, and lights the Linto’s red front panel LED on peaks…”

“There don’t seem to be too many players in the phono cartridge game any more: Audio-Technica, Ortofon (no longer distributed in Canada), Linn, Shure, sort of with a recycled V-15 V, and who else? Well, Grado has gone public by announcing not one, but three ranges of new models, truly anachronistically ambitious for such a small company…”