• McIntosh’s turntable comes with valves

You want to buy a record player? Certainly sir. Would you like valves with that? How many watts, exactly? That classic ‘Not The Nine o’Clock News’ hi-fi shop sketch has become even more dated, if not downright meaningless, as a new breed of turntables emerges, adding facilities undreamed-of to the vinyl spinners of old. There’s our cover star this issue, Yamaha’s VINYL 500 streaming turntable, with a full streaming multiroom source hidden inside. And Pro-Ject has its ‘Jukebox’ series of turntables in some markets (not Australia as yet), with Bluetooth and internal amplifiers to drive an attached pair of speakers.

And now McIntosh has taken up the challenge with this MTI100 ‘integrated’ turntable. It’s ‘integrated’ because it

has an amplifier built in, so you can connect your speakers directly to the turntable, and being McIntosh, this includes a valve pre-amplifier stage with the two 12AX7 ‘tubes’, as our Binghamton friends refer to them, glowing green on the bottom right of the plinth. (They don’t really glow green; McIntosh has put green LEDs underneath them, to emphasise the company colours.) The power amplifier is a solid-state Class-D design.

The MTI100 also has analogue and digital inputs on the back (right), so you can connect other components to it in the manner of

any other amplifier; its phono preamplifier is housed in an internal shielded box. There’s even on-board Bluetooth, so you can stream to it from your phone. This really is a turntable to which you need only add speakers! With McIntosh celebrating its 70th birthday this year, the MTI100 is a product that is clearly looking forward, as well as back. The Australian price will be $11,995, and we gather the first units may arrive by the time you read this. More info: www.synergyaudio.com.