Hadcock - high
precision unipivot tonearms, developed utilizing twenty-five years of experience
and expertise. A name familiar to all serious veteran analog enthusiasts.
Lovingly handmade to exceptionally high standards utilizing
only the very highest quality materials.
Before leaving the factory each arm is
extensively checked and tested to ensure that it meets or exceeds all
specifications laid down by the design team.
Hadcock GH242-SE
Picture from HiFi+ Magazine, Issue 13 Sep/Oct
2001
"If it ain't broke,
don't fix it" is an aphorism that could be applied a little more diligently to
the world of hi-fi, along with that other perennial chestnut, "There's nothing
new under the sun". As an industry we seem to forget more than we ever learn
about the art of making music in the home, and more often than not, each new
miracle cure or product turns out to be some old, established idea or technology
simply recycled and rebadged. Of course some of them never went away, they just
shrank a little (or in some cases a lot) from the glare of the fashionable
spotlight. The Hadcock arms are a classic example. Long declared dead and laid
to rest in their UK home market, they have, nonetheless, soldiered happily along
overseas. But what goes around comes around (never let it be said that I
crossed the road to avoid a cliche) and the Hadcock is back, selling again in
its native Isles.
Of course, whether or
not you considered it "broke" in the first place depends on your point of view.
Alongside SME, the Hadcock tonearms used to be amongst the most successful on
the UK market. However, the advent of the LP12, and more importantly the Grace
G707 and Linn Ittok arms saw a sea change in favour of gimbal bearings for use
on the nervous suspended decks that rapidly became de riguer. Uni-pivots, for
such were the Hadcocks, craved rather more stability than they got from a
lightweight three-point suspended sub-chassis, and their performance suffered
accordingly. Sensibly they emigrated to Germany and Japan, where high-mass decks
still held sway (or rather didn't, if you get my drift). Even a brief and
probably ill-advised flirtation with fixed bearings in the GH220 couldn't stop
the rot, and Hadcock all but disappeared from view. But fashion is nothing if
not predictable, and yo these many years later, high-mass turntables and
unipivot arms are back in vogue, even if the current incumbents do borrow
wholesale from the archaeological store chest of hi-fi's history. The
Hadcock GH242 is an exception to that rule; it is hi-fi history. If you
don't believe me just take a look on page 95 of Hi-Fi Choice number 24. There
you'll see the GH228 Export, a 9" dead-ringer for the 10" 242 I've got in front
of me. Oh, there are differences. The 242 uses a stainless steel armtube rather
than the aluminum alloy one on the 228, which also accounts for the change from
black to the current chrome finish. This also increases the effective mass
slightly, making the arm happier with today's lower compliance cartridges.
However, the bearing and the mechanical structure of the arm are, to all intents
and purposes, identical, so I guess that's where we should start.
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Ah yes, the
performance. The GH242 had the unenviable task of stepping into the shoes
vacated by my VPI JMW 12.5, as 12" unipivot that costs about three times the
price of the Hadcock. Under the circumstances, it handled a potentially
difficult situation with aplomb, offering a different but equally valid view of
musical events. Score one for the underdog.
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The Hadcock was
happiest with the Music Maker, a combination that made the most of the
cartridge's tonal and organic qualities, creating a potent cocktail with the
242's dynamic life and transparency. Together they are capable of
challenging (and occasionally embarrassing) the musical virtues of many a highly
touted and extortionately priced combination. Deeply unfashionable (a
moving-iron cartridge in an unashamedly dated tonearm) they more than make up in
performance what they like in audiophile credibility. Many a vaunted arm
has struggled to decipher Neil Young's Sleeps With Angels . The
Hadcock might skate over some of the more excessive bass abuse, but the diction
ands separation of the vocals is never in question. Midrange is where
the music is, and it's what the 242 excels at.
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It used to be
difficult to recommend a sensible and cost effective upgrade from Rega.
Not anymore. On the right deck and loaded with the right cartridge
the Hadcock offers performance and musical integrity way beyond its
price. Not as pretty as a Morch or as solid as an SME 309, it
outperforms either when it comes to delivering the essence of a musical
performance. They say you can't teach old dogs new tricks.
On the evidence of the GH242, perhaps you don't need to.
Richard White sticks his arm out to
hail the latest unipivot offering from G.C. Hadcock, the GH242 SE.
Unipivot arms have, as the name implies, one universal
pivot which permits the arm to rock about the bearing in any direction.
it's an attractive arrangement in many ways: for a start, it's simple;
second, provided that the bearing is properly designed and made,
friction can be minimized to exceptionally low figures. Lastly,
the set-up is inherently self-balancing - there is no tendency for
gravity, acting through a fixed-axis pivot point, to push the arm across
the record in either direction.
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All this care in design and manufacture need not, of
course, produce a listenable result. How does it sound ?
Properly speaking, it doesn't. For an arm which will happily carry
rather stiff MCs right the way to exceedingly compliant (30c.u.+)
variable reluctant types, the Hadcock 242's modesty is startling.
Having tried it out with an extensive variety of cartridges, from a
£30 MM Stanton to a
£1700 MC van den Hul, all I
can report is that, if the Hadcock is adding any coloration, the result
is only an improvement. As regards its tracking ability, the new
geometry is spot on, with the inner zero error point coinciding with the
'worst' groove on most LP records - a very happy result.
The Hadcock's price is roughly comparable with the Rega
900 and the SME 300 range and, in my opinion, it is both more versatile
and more able than either. In truth its performance places it
in a higher class altogether. All-in-all, whether you view it
as a bargain high-ender or as an improbably musical medium-pricer, the
GH242SE deserves a long blissful listen.
The images produced were beautifully stable, poised and
attentive. The Hadcock turned out to be far less temperamental than the
Moerch UP4 I lived with and loved, but sported the same gorgeous
midrange. At the same time, bass was considerably more present and well
defined. The Moerch, with its S-shaped arm wand and lowered
counterweight was less happy tracking warped records and probably wasn't
as good a tracker in the first place. The 242SE's take is altogether
more assured. Like the Moerch, the Hadcock presents an ever so subtle
lifting of the leading edges. Could that be due to the stainless-steel
arm wands they both have in common? It gave Boccherini's "La Musica
Notturna delle Strade di Madrid" (that's "The Night Music of the Streets
of Madrid") on Die Röhre - The Tube [Tacet L74] a delightful
vibrancy at the expense of what I perceive to be "neutrality".
But on this record, the Hadcock also produced something close to the
levels of deep jet blackness the Schroder achieves. When the violins are
nail-plucked, the ticking sounds were full of the harmonic structure
standing out from the silence. The inter-relationship between melody and
countermelody was beautifully rendered, rhythms well caught and
delineated. Instruments appeared well separated and with a good
three-dimensional harmonic envelope. Boccherini's resolute bass motif
came forward with full weight and scale. Time to smile, and smile big.
I evaluated the Hadcock with several cartridges, from the
Allaerts MC1S to the Music Maker 2 (an unusually brilliant match), from
a Scheu-modded Benz Glider to a high-compliance Van den Hul Empire
MC1000. The arm easily distinguished the sonic character of each one. If
it imparted a sonic character of its own, I would place it as giving
forth a sense of purposeful energy, but one that has not lost poise and
control. The slight lift of leading edges remained apparent with all
cartridges.
In
my last review I described the Morsiani unipivot as the most musical arm I'd
heard, dodging many Hi-Fi attributes for a unique ease and flow. The Hadcock
goes completely the other way, taking on gimballed arms such as the SME4 and
Artemiz head-to-head. With the Music Maker on board the result is that the
information retrieval is astonishing. Here is a unipivot that will drag
every ounce of detail from your records, it seeks out leading edges so
making it incredibly fast - it seems bursting with energy, only the Artemiz
comes close.
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The Hadcock 242
Silver is not cheap. In fact it costs much the same as an SME4. Where the
'4' looks a million dollars, the Hadcock looks a little eccentric. But on
the Michell Orbe at least, the 242 Silver is a clear winner on sound quality.
The Morsiani I preferred to the SME as well, but in that case it was hard to
judge as it was so different, all I can say was it made me want to play more
music. The Hadcock on the other hand was an easy comparison because it
simply did what the SME did - better. That the thing is simple to set up,
should last forever and is rather different from the rest of the herd is
just the icing on the cake.
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And now my system has a new "reference" for
others to beat. The Hadcock with either the Music Maker or the XX-2
cleans up the bottom end of the Orbe and just makes music so much fun, so
that the SME has to take third place. That my two favourite arms are
unipivots is significant, I'm not saying that a unipivot is a guarantee of
quality (I didn't much like the Kuzma), but those "flat earthers" that have
been banging on about them for the last 20 years obviously have something
going for them.
