It may have a rotating platter and a tonearm, but apart from that the Gearbox Automatic is a turntable out of the ordinary.
Not only do you get a transparent chassis and a belt-driven glass platter, but a fully automatic gramophone with built-in phono stage – with tubes! – so you can connect it to any amplifier. Or a Bluetooth speaker with audio input.
It’s also wireless and has a unique feature: music recognition, so tracks from vinyl records can be tagged and added to your Spotify playlist, so you can listen to your vinyl records even when you’re on the move.
True plug and play, then, and the turntable, made by Pro-Ject, comes with a pre-mounted Ortofon OM 10 MM pickup and is easy to set up.
Gearbox Automatic is available only from Gearbox Records online and costs £550, or just under €600 before postage and VAT, so it’s not cheap. But then you have a turntable that very few others have.
