Turntable of the Year over $5000
MUSIC SOURCES It may impart quite the physical presence to your music rack, it may be a marvel of engineering, but once the music is playing the GT-5000 simply gets out of the way and delivers the highest joys of vinyl.
In recent years Yamaha has been reconfirming its abilities to deliver stunning two-channel audio, releasing the 5000 Series, which is all-analogue, and headed by this $12,995 GT-5000 turntable, the final component released as source for the pre/power amplifiers, plus the iconic (and award-winning) NS-5000 speakers.
While it’s made to match those components perfectly (with the option of using balanced outputs into the preamplifier), the GT-5000 will impress in any suitable system of quality. It makes quite the impression just physically, indeed. This turntable takes cues from the company’s 1982 GT-2000 (some of whose engineers were ‘recalled’ to advise on the development of the new turntable), back when GT stood for ‘Gigantic & Tremendous’, clearly a concept while still applies. In our picture above, the GT-5000’s platter looks a bit small, dwarfed by the plinth beneath. But in fact the platter is much larger than normal — 35cm in diameter. Hence the whole turntable is similarly enlarged, the chassis around 55cm wide, 40cm deep, 24cm high, and finished in high-gloss piano black (and Yamaha knows a thing or two about pianos). Onto this fits the 2.025kg subplatter and 4.88kg silvery-alloy main platter, unusual not simply because it’s so wide and heavy, but because of a ‘gutter’ around it, into which fits the rubber mat’s matching moulded gutter, both extending beyond the edge of a plattered vinyl album.
The tonearm is also unusual — straight, with a shorter effective length than most, lacking an offset angle or any anti-skating device. Yamaha provided detailed technical responses to our questions on this (for which refer to our full Australian Hi-Fi review in the Sept-Oct 2020 issue). But the proof is, as they say, in the pudding, and it’s quite the sonic pudding — all that mass delivering absolute stability to even the most extended of piano notes, and a sound so smooth it allowed a beautiful ease and ‘flow’ to all the music we played. The GT-5000 also sailed through albums loaded with more bass energy than most ordinary phono cartridges (and tonearms) can handle, while delivering music against a profoundly silent backdrop — rumble, signal-to-noise, call it what you will, you won’t hear it issuing from the GT-5000.
All of which contributed to this turntable’s ability to transport the listener to a higher plane. It may impart quite the physical presence to your music rack, it may be a marvel of engineering, but once the music is playing the GT-5000 simply gets out of the way and delivers the highest joys of vinyl.
More info: au.yamaha.com