SHURE SME TONEARM SERIES
The Series II stayed in production for 10 years. Instead of a steel arm tube, the Series II used a polished, bright-anodised aluminium arm tube, 9. I recall going into the small tool room and asking if we had any aluminium tube. It came about because my burgeoning interest in hi-fi had reached the point where I was dissatisfied with what the market offered.Īt that time, the Scale Model Equipment Co Ltd, as SME was then titled, had a useful precision-engineering capability built up over the preceding 12 years. Robertson-Aikman, above all an engineer, was also a music lover able to construct his own system. Founded in by Robertson-Aikman, SME made scale models and parts for the model-engineering trade and hobbyist model builder. SME TurntablesĮven the near-elliptical tonearm cut-out served as the default arm aperture for countless manufacturers that supplied armless decks, from Garrard to Thorens to Technics. The SME was, and is, the most popular and influential quality tonearm in history. Robertson-Aikman felt the more affordable M2 was its true successor.Īfter four decades, total sales neared a half-million units.
It stayed in production untilbut not because the superior Series V supplanted it both models ran concurrently for almost 20 years. Moreover, the first headshells used with the -prior to the arrival of the familiar, drilled-out SME design-were Ortofon shells with SME badges on the front.ĭue to his unfailing honesty and integrity, SME founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman found it mildly disconcerting that the headshell-mounting system became known colloquially as the SME mount Ortofon deserved the credit. Indeed, many audiophiles still swear by it, and with good reason: Despite it being associated, in the minds of many, with high-compliance moving-magnet cartridges because of strong associations with Shure, it was, in fact, designed with the then-dominant, heavy, low-compliance Ortofon moving-coil cartridges in the SPU series. Depending on when you start the counting, last year marked the 50th anniversary of the SME tonearm.
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