In a world where hi-fi headlines scream about six-figure behemoths, it’s downright rebellious to celebrate the underdogs—those vintage turntables that, according to thousands of audiophiles polled by Headphonesty, still smoke today’s high-tech platters in sheer musical magic. Alexandra Plesa’s freshly updated roundup, “20 Best Vintage Turntables That Still Outperform Modern Decks” (dropped September 30, 2025), […]
The original Townshend Rock Reference turntable is one of the legends of audio. Unusual and inventive in design and fabulous in sound, but never widely available, the Rock Reference is now a rare collector’s item. Its less expensive successor, the Rock III, also offered extraordinary sound quality and many of the same unique design features […]
Decades ago, Townshend Audio made a groundbreaking contribution to the world of vinyl playback with the introduction of the Rock Reference turntable. With design input from Jack Dinsdale and John Bugge at the Cranfield Institute of Technology, this innovative system featured a unique method for damping the tone arm at the cartridge end via […]
by Jack Dinsdale Conception My initial ideas for what has become the Rock family of high performance record players were conceived in the late 1960s and early 1970s, not as a “big bang” (in any sense of the expression) but as the gradual coming together of a number of disparate ideas. The origins of these […]
