The Triangle Art Reference is one of two turntables currently offered by this company.

As the name suggests, the Reference is currently their flagship product with an MSRP of $13,990.

The Reference from Triangle Art is what I like to call a “naked” or skeletal belt-drive design. In other words, it lacks a plinth. The tone arm, platter/bearing, and motor are therefore located in three largely independent structures. The entire turntable, with the exception of the threaded cone footers, is constructed of machined aluminum and steel; roughly 250 pounds of it. It sports a massive main structural base that houses the bearing well, tonearm mounting pod, and three struts that are finished with threaded brass leveling cones. The massive 4-inch thick 45-pound, aluminum platter is driven by a belt that is run from a detached AC synchronous motor nested inside a 20-pound housing. The platter speed is controlled by the included outboard Kelly Audio 2-speed drive controller. The extra long center spindle is threaded so as to facilitate use of a clamp or weight of your choice (neither of which is provided). Triangle Art provides a custom-drilled aluminum tone arm board that is made to fit the tonearm the purchaser intends to use. The standard board will accommodate 9-inch tonearms and there is an optional specialty board for 12-inch tonearms. After some consideration as well as time constraints, I opted to utilize the standard tone arm board and my modified vintage Technics EPA 500 tone arm system for the purposes of this review.

Set-up and Installation

The turntable arrived in a large reinforced wooden crate. Each massive component of the turntable was separately wrapped and packaged to assure safe delivery. Thankfully, since the turntable is of a skeletal design and therefore largely modular, it was relatively easy to move upstairs to my sound room piece-by-piece, though still quite a workout – a secondary healthful “benefit” to buying a turntable of this heft! For initial set-up, I assembled the massive 3-legged structure directly on the Billy Bags rack’s composite top, mounted my EPA 500, and got the turntable system up and running. Over the following ten days or so, I went through much iteration of listening tests, position corrections, and tweaks until I determined that I was hearing the Triangle Arts “Reference” at its optimal. During that process, I determined that the best turntable performance was achieved through the use of a Delrin plate platform (more about this later). I also chose a Delrin clamp over a brass and aluminum center weight for use throughout the review process. Both the plate and clamp provided the most neutral interface with the turntable-rack as well as with the vinyl-platter combinations.

Taming the Beast

As I alluded to in my description of the set-up process, initial findings can be very misleading, especially when it comes to analog because of the many variables that are at play in evaluating a turntable, especially a skeletal one. During my first Sunday extended listening session, I wanted to assure that the overall analog system was sounding reasonably good and working well as an integral system. For this, I depend upon some old Sheffield Direct-to-Disc favorites as well as some less-than-audiophile-oriented acoustic recordings. My initial findings were surprising, at least, to me. The turntable was exhibiting poor bass control on dynamic material, an indistinct soundstage, and had an overall blurring of the lower vocal registers. Base on my experiences, this suggested either a poor tonearm-turntable interface, aka the tonearm mounting plate, or the that turntable was having isolation issues. Since it was Sunday and therefore wasn’t likely to stir up much enthusiasm from my machinist friend to CNC a tonearm board for me out of acetal plate, I opted to play with different footing materials for the entire aluminum/steel/brass beast.

The next several iterations of changes involved rolling through different footer materials including Cocobolo wood, 1-inch aluminum plate, glass-filled Polycarbonate, and a ½-inch acetal plate. After several hours, the turntable “popped” into a sweet spot with the acetal. Not satisfied that I had done everything possible to exact maximum performance from the Triangle Art Reference, I got to work on the outboard motor. I rolled through the same materials and though the differences (yes, some caused the sound to worsen) were slight when compared to the changes they wrought on the main turntable, it was clear that the optimal footer for the motor was the 1-inch aluminum plate. If all of this sounds way too anal-retentive, well perhaps it should. This is really what it takes to optimize your system environment. There is no such thing as plug-and-play once you get into high performance 2-channel audio. The more elevated your system gets in terms of detail and clarity, the more obvious these small warts become. Having lived with full-range electrostatic speakers for close to 10 years I am used to this built-in challenge: Get it right or suffer the consequences. In this case, I was certain that I finally got it right!

The Listening Sessions

Armed with the absolute confidence in my knowledge of the sonic signature of the two tonearm-cartridge combinations I used, I played a long list of LP’s from my collection that I knew would get to the heart of what the Triangle Art Reference was all about.

Going right for the wide dynamics, speed, and top-to-bottom punch, I played an old favorite Direct-to-Disc recording from Sheffield Labs, James Newton-Howard and Friends. The results were indeed surprising. I suppose I must have done a very adequate job of isolating the various pieces of the playback system because indeed, the definitive soundstaging, powerful dynamics, and pristine cymbals clearly bested my reference – a highly modified and optimized VPI TNT, fitted with a 3-phase Papst thread-drive system.

The Triangle Art Reference appeared to elevate the sonic performance of my Nakatsuka-San designed Accuphase phono cartridge to that of the Gold-Coiled ZYX-branded Nakatsuka cartridges. In other words, high frequency distortion was vanishingly low and had a breathy delicate sweetness on cymbals and bells that is as good as any analog set-up I have heard. As good as the high frequency performance was, the bass was even better news. Once optimized with proper footing, the Triangle Art Reference produced deep, rich, powerful, bass with no hint of overhang, tell-tale cloudiness or loss of focus, or what I like to call “death-sign.” Death-sign is when the platter/vinyl interface is so heavily damped that the dynamics are actually underdeveloped or otherwise severely limited. A quick listen to another classic from my arsenal, a first pressing of Octopus by Gentle Giant (UK Vertigo label), proved to be even more compelling. Of particular note was the clean, powerful, and explosive energy when playing the cuts “Knots” and “Boys in the Band.” These, once again, came through as effortless-yet-powerful, portraying a particular lack of distortion in both ends of the frequency extremes.

Playing other excellent recordings such as Peter Gabriel’s “Scratch My Back” and the Townsend/Lane classic, “Rough Mix” echoed my notes written about Neil Young. Indeed, the rock solid, well-constructed and massive platform provided by the Triangle Art Reference made my tonearm and cartridge shine as never before.

The Package

Evaluating a 100% modular turntable is a tricky endeavor. There are turntable designs out there that appear to be of a modular or skeletal design, but also provide a base that is optimized and tuned as a singular platform for the various components of the turntable. Not so with the Triangle Art Reference. The heavy lifting of the set-up process is left largely to you, the end user. This is not to say that its design concept and execution are any less valid than an integral turntable, far from it. Personally, since I’m a born tweaker, I enjoy the ritualistic and methodical set-up process and I happen to love all things analog, as do many of us. However, by the same token, I realize that there are just as many who are not so inclined, for whom set-it-and-forget-it reigns supreme. That’s all well and good.