This first arm officially became a product in 1959. “I recall going into the small tool room,” he said many years later, “and asking if we had any aluminium tube!” Within the year he had built a prototype that he showed to the Senior Technical Editor of Gramophone magazine, Percy Wilson, who told him that two or three of his friends might like one, adding, “Perhaps an annual turnover of as many as a thousand pieces might be possible.” This figure stuck with AR-A because during the week of one of Wilson’s last visits to the plant, SME had “built a thousand units and was averaging seven-hundred-and-fifty units per week.” But finding himself dissatisfied with existing tonearms, he decided to design one for himself. An opera lover, AR-A, as he was affectionately known throughout the company (and eventually the world of high-end audio), quickly embraced the long-playing record. SME stands for the Scale Model Equipment company, a British firm founded in 1946 by Alastair Robertson-Aikman to manufacture precision models for the exhibition and model-engineering trade. As over a half century of innovative design and standard-setting precision in engineering and manufacturing lie behind this new product, it is worth tracing its lineage.
SME’s new model is the latest turntable-with-tonearm package from a company whose long and honorable history makes one regret the adjective “iconic” has been so preposterously overused these last many years.
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