Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4004 // Vintage / Linear Tracking Turntable / MMC 20CL Cartridge

The Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4004 is the kind of turntable that makes you rethink what a record player is supposed to be. Designed by Jacob Jensen and built in Denmark at the tail end of the 1970s, it dispenses with the pivoted tonearm entirely — a linear-tracking tangential arm glides across the groove in a dead-straight line, just as the cutting lathe did, leaving virtually no tracking error and no skating force. The sonic result is an uncanny ease and precision: bass lines land with authority, stereo imaging opens up wide, and there's a naturalness to sibilants that makes you reach for the next record before the last one finishes. The sculpted aluminum lid, teak or rosewood plinth, and that distinctive floating platter — this thing is as much furniture as it is a piece of hi-fi. Nearly five decades on, it still turns heads and still sounds like a machine that was embarrassingly ahead of its time.

S/N: be130183