Jan 2023 - The start of my engineering in Hi-Fi journey

I’d like to talk about the Naim Aro tone arm. I think the Aro is an amazing arm, and although it was first made in 1987 it still performs extremely well today even compared to the latest arms. One of the many reasons i like the idea of a this type of arm is that it uses a uni-pivot bearing which has very little to no resistance giving it particularly fluid and free movement, I also like that it can be removed form the pivot easily and unplugged to allow another arm wand to be attached this is very useful if you have multiple or different phono cartridges you wan to use for example a mono and a stereo one.

My passion for the Naim Aro started about 6 years ago when I decided to restore a Lenco L75 transcription deck which I’d recently acquired. I thought it would be an interesting challenge for myself to make a tone arm for it.

So I decided to make a tone arm very much inspired by the Aro arm, I made and completed this using an old Tom Senior milling machine and Axminster Tools lathe. This was a challenge because I hadn't had any real experience using these machines apart from watching my dad in the workshop from time to time. At this point and even up to today we have never actually used a real Aro or even seen one in person, we just took our inspiration from online articles and images from various internet forums.

At the same as this I was restoring and slightly modifying the Lenco L75 to fit the tone arm, I brought the L75 from eBay for around £75 and also brought a plinth for it from a fellow Lenco Heaven forum user, i cant remember who now but it was made very well, I veneered it with some very old Brazilian Rosewood veneer i found on eBay may years prior.

After about a year of listening to music and playing with the Aro clone on the L75, I was confident that I could design my own tone arm with the help of my dad. Taking inspiration from the Aro build and adding my own ideas might be route for me to follow my dream of making quality audio products.

While designing our own inspired arm we started to notice areas that could be improved upon like adding an integral arm lift, adding slots to the head shell to allow for cartridge alignment and several others as we progressed. My Dad was also fascinated with improving the original design. His day job is solving extremely complicated engineering challenges for aerospace and medical companies and that knowledge and expertise has been instrumental in its research and development.

So that's how my crazy idea of trying to design, make, and take to market a new uni pivot tone arm has come about. It will all be made in-house by me and my dad and to add to the challenge we will use as little outsourcing as possible. We started out designing the tone arm for the Lenco L75 as that was my favourite turntable to use at the time even though I also had a Linn LP12 with a Mk1 Ekos arm on it. Originally of course the Aro was designed for the LP12, so my new version should also be able work with the LP12.

Once we started to make some parts from the first design iteration, we very quickly realized that with only an old manual milling machine and lathe there was no way we could make anything to the standard we wanted. Making a viable business from it as well was out the window too because the time it takes to make complex parts with old machinery was not economical.

Time for a re-think. The next chapter in this story will continue soon…