Thorens has been in the business of playing music mechanically since 1883, when Hermann Thorens registered a workshop in Sainte-Croix, in the Swiss Jura, to make music boxes. The company built cylinder phonographs, funnel gramophones, disc changers, and — for a period — a mechanical razor, before producing its first electric gramophone motor and magnetic pickup in 1928. A hundred and forty years is not a marketing claim here. It is a record.
The TD 124 arrived in 1957 and became one of the few turntables that never really left the conversation. Its modern descendant, the TD 124 DD, keeps the proportions and the name but replaces the original idler-wheel drive with high-precision direct drive, for the torque and speed stability that arrangement allows while keeping vibration away from the platter. It sits on a height-adjustable aluminium chassis with an external power supply and both balanced and single-ended outputs, and its TP 124 tonearm sets anti-skating through a ruby bearing.
The current range runs from the fully automatic TD 102 A and the TD 200 series through the direct-drive TD 400 line and the belt-driven TD 1500, TD 1600, and TD 1601. Above all of them sits the New Reference, introduced in 2024 as successor to the 1979 original: a three-tonearm deck whose active isolation system, the Sky-Hook-Damper, was developed with Seismion, a German specialist in active vibration control for semiconductor and laboratory work.
Thorens GmbH has been owned since 2018 by Gunter Kürten, formerly of ELAC, who returned the company to Germany and now runs it from Bergisch Gladbach.
The TD 124 DD Exclusive we carry wears an EMT Tondose 124 cartridge — two broadcast-bred houses on one deck. Hear a Thorens turntable at the shop.
