Hi–Fi History: Why the Tonearm was Invented

As we step into 2025 there are a whole host of upgrades available on the market for your turntable. We make many that get more out of your vinyl grooves. In this article, however, I wanted to explore the origins of the first significant upgrade to the turntable. I’m writing, of course, about the humble then, and maybe not so humble now, tonearm. We have great respect for the early pioneers of audio. If things we now take for granted hadn’t been invented, the high-fidelity experience may have looked very different to how it does today. To look at how tonearms came into existence, we need to look all the way back to 1870, when a German immigrant Emile Berliner landed in New York. He worked menial jobs while spending his evenings conducting experiments with telephone transmitters in a makeshift lab set up in his boardinghouse. Berliner caught the attention of the Bell Telephone Company and began employment there. He soon lost interest in the telephone and instead pursued the creation of a machine for recording and reproducing sound. It was during this time he was able to create the gramophone, which used a horn to acoustically amplify the vibration of a needle (connected to a diaphragm) running through the groove of a shellac record. By doing so, Berliner realised an idea first conceived by French Inventor Charles Cros from the work of French scientist Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville. Berliner realised and developed many of the fundamentals of the turntable and the recorded disc we recognise today, such as the spinning platter and the black disc with its recorded spiral groove. We’d even recognise the metal stamping process used in production today That Berliner invented to mass manufacture recorded shellac discs. At this point in the tonearms story, though, we turn to one of Berliner’s American employees; Eldridge Johnson. Once a machinist, Johnson aided Berliner’s design, improving engineering on the hand-cranked motor and improving the sound box. The sound box was the round assembly pictured below that contained the needle necessary to play through the grooves. Here’s how the gramophone works: Vibrating according to the record’s groove, the needle’s movement causes a diaphragm attached to it to make larger corresponding movements. Much like a speaker driver, as the diaphragm moves, it continuously changes the air pressure in the base of the attached horn. The horn then acoustically amplifies this into a (semi) listenable volume. We might think about this as a very proto cartridge, though the cartridge is, of course, its own groundbreaking invention. See this illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tmWIb-7_no If you consider that the entire assembly of the large horn balances on the sound box and the needle, you begin to wonder how the needle managed to move at all. It was counterweighted to some degree, so we could think about the whole assembly as a quasi-tonearm (what’s the effective mass of that eh?). But really the tonearm was invented in 1902 when Johnson developed an additional tube at the base of the horn that could hold the sound box in separation from the weight of the horn and rest with a lot less weight on the record surface. The invention of the tonearm vastly improved the sound quality of the gramophone and hugely reduced the wear and tear to the recorded shellac disc, meaning that users had a closer fidelity to the recorded sound and could use their records for longer! Here’s how the gramophone works: Vibrating according to the record’s groove, the needle’s movement causes a diaphragm attached to it to make larger corresponding movements. Much like a speaker driver, as the diaphragm moves, it continuously changes the air pressure in the base of the attached horn. The horn then acoustically amplifies this into a (semi) listenable volume. We might think about this as a very proto cartridge, though the cartridge is, of course, its own groundbreaking invention. See this illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tmWIb-7_no If you consider that the entire assembly of the large horn balances on the sound box and the needle, you begin to wonder how the needle managed to move at all. It was counterweighted to some degree, so we could think about the whole assembly as a quasi-tonearm (what’s the effective mass of that eh?). But really the tonearm was invented in 1902 when Johnson developed an additional tube at the base of the horn that could hold the sound box in separation from the weight of the horn and rest with a lot less weight on the record surface. The invention of the tonearm vastly improved the sound quality of the gramophone and hugely reduced the wear and tear to the recorded shellac disc, meaning that users had a closer fidelity to the recorded sound and could use their records for longer! What’s so interesting here is how freedom of movement for the needle to track the groove resulted in a huge improvement in the sound. This is still much the same today, and alongside freedom of movement, there are many more things a tonearm can do to improve sound quality. Our developments may not have been as fundamental as Berliner and Johnson’s, but we have been researching and developing tonearms for over two decades here at Origin Live. We came up with a few innovations in the tonearm realm ourselves, such as the dual pivot bearing for stable vertical freedom of movement, as well as developing highly decoupled gimbal bearing assemblies, multi-layer counterweights, high-performance arm tubes, high mass yokes, and so much more, All painstakingly developed through careful analysis and listening tests. Questions like, ‘Which material out of 20 sounds the best?’ Or ‘How should those components be shaped, weighted, treated, arranged and joined?’ Have been crucial to finding the best performance from vinyl playback in price points ranging from affordable to cost-no-object. Our products come about through engineering principles applied, tested, revised, and tested again, exhaustively, until we find what we’re after: something closer to the original sound of live music. The only absolute sound reference is live music (not amplified live music). Some systems get much closer to this than others. A better tonearm will always help to make this possible. Many notice that a truly high-grade vinyl system has more depth, more dynamics, and more life to it than a digital counterpart. There are many reasons for this. A fundamental reason is that the stylus creates an electrical signal mechanically by electromagnetically inducing a voltage. The cartridge signal pre-phono doesn’t rely on any electrical power for its creation. Digital, unfortunately, does, and no matter how much filtering and regulation goes into treating the power source, many polluting elements such as voltage noise, always remain in varying degrees.  This affects the creation of the digital waveform, its transients, and its subsequent performance. It is also a fact that the analogue signal doesn’t suffer from the digital artefacts created in algorithmically converting signal from CDs, large formats and streaming. Digital artefacts  are distortions and errors that occur during the recording, manipulation and playback of digital audio. Some might argue this is ludicrous because many vinyl records are made from digital recordings, but the dynamic range compression of the master used for making vinyl often tends to be better than its digital counterpart. Not only this however, since this objection overlooks the significance of converting the digital signal into mechanical movements to create the record stamping plate. It is this mechanical movement which filters out many artefacts and is much closer to natural analogue which the ear loves to hear. It is just as true today as it was in 1902 that the tonearm greatly improves the sound quality of your records. Tonearms need to be designed not only to minimise unwanted vibrations, but designed and tuned by ear to take care of the effect on the cartridge signal. There are many subpar examples on the market. Origin Live tonearms offer better performance than any other at an equivalent cost. We pride ourselves on years of development, awards for the results, and, subsequently, more development in our pursuit of higher fidelity. A better tonearm surprises so many with the dramatic level of sonic improvement achieved. Simply providing a rock-solid platform for your cartridge enables it to perform at a whole new level. Of course, a better signal to your speakers, in turn, enables them to perform at a whole new level, with increased separation of instruments, the soundstage widening and deepening, and the timbres of the music hitting you with natural dynamics throughout the whole of the frequency range. You can find out more about our award-winning range of tonearms for every budget here: View Tonearms £480 – £26,000 > If you’d like to contact us for more information or advice, please get in touch via originlive@originlive.com All the best, David Baker