Origin Live Sovereign S Mk5 turntable and Agile tonearm

We might think that among the current crop of high-end turntables it would be possible to identify some commonality and consistency of design. But, with a few exceptions that’s not the case.

Some claim suspension is required, others say no suspension is best. Some say the plinth should be skeletal, others that quite the reverse, it should be high-mass. Some say the platter should be lightweight, while others specify a heavyweight approach. How the platter should be driven is also a point of fundamental disagreement, with some specifying a single DC motor, others claiming AC drive is the way to go and still others that want to use two or even three motors. And that’s before we get to the menu of different materials turntable designers want to use from slate to acrylic, ceramic, titanium, solid wood, carbon fibre and so on.

Origin Live’s founder and designer Mark Baker has been confidently consistent, continuing to keep faith with essentially the same turntable design philosophy for over two decades. That’s not to say that the company’s current turntables are identical to those of yesteryear. Baker has applied multiple, iterative changes over time; to platters, power supply designs, bearings and drive belts. What hasn’t changed is the appearance of the turntables, and that’s because the distinctive Origin Live form-factor results from engineering principles established right at the start.

First principles

There are five models at different price-points in the company’s core range, plus a flagship design that is an outlier both technically and price-wise. The core range starts with the £1,600 Aurora and tops out with the £8,300 Sovereign S.

The distinctive shape results from Baker’s unique use of a cantilevered construction, with the platter bearing and arm fixed at opposite ends of a substantial beam with a single mounting bolt nominally equidistant between the two ends. The bolt fixes the assembly to the plinth. Think playground seesaw…kind of.

The plinth assemblies are formed of acrylic – any colour we want, as long as it is black – while other materials with dissimilar but complimentary impedances and resonances are deployed as vibration dampers and barriers at multiple points. The basic design confers a modularity that enables a ladder of sonic performance to be achieved by the progressive addition of further resonance-controlling elements and plinth mass. The entry level turntable, the Aurora, has it in critical areas. The costliest, the Sovereign S, takes the mass and damping to the max. At nearly 29kg, it is more than twice the weight, with a double layer of acrylic in the plinth, sandwiching steel. The plinth’s three richly chromed outriggers act as both massy dampers and pods for the turntable’s adjustable feet. The standard Sovereign is priced at £6,800. An extra £1,500 buys the S version with a more complex multi-layer platter and an outboard balanced mains transformer with a higher rating than that of the standard turntable. Higher-grade components and regulation, plus wiring in Origin Live’s own hybrid of copper and silver, are to be found in the Mk5 power supply.

The review Sovereign S was fitted with a 9.5-inch Origin Live Agile tonearm, at £10,200 one model below the company’s flagship £26,000 Renown arm. The Agile features Origin Live’s usual arrangement of dual-monopivots set across the axis of the arm tube to allow virtually friction-free vertical movement, while horizontal tracking is controlled by a more conventional ceramic bearing. The arm tube is aluminium with carbon fibre and other coatings. The yoke, a heavyweight affair, has a mirror-like chrome finish. The counterweight is de-coupled from the arm tube to prevent reflection of energy and it combines both co-axial and off-set mass, the latter with fine adjustment. Decoupling is also deployed at the interface between the bearings and the yoke, and the headshell and the arm tube. It is a joy of an arm to handle, with an impeccable fit and finish that befits a product at its price point. It is available in 12-inch, 10-inch, Rega-fitting 9.5-inch and Linn 9-inch lengths.

Jiggery pokery

The turntable arrived in two boxes and required the bearing and tonearm beam assembly to be mated to the plinth, the single fixing bolt being tightened using a supplied box spanner. The plinth feet were adjusted to level the turntable, the bearing charged with metered oil from the included vial, and the Agile tonearm fitted. Job done in under half an hour.

A dealer will deliver an assembled package, but as a DIY prospect assembly is not at all daunting, a notable contrast to the Groundhog Day rigmarole of cable ‘dressing’, spring adjustment and general jiggery-pokery required by some designs. It’s also a fit and more-or-less-forget turntable with nothing to go out of tune or require dealer servicing. Fit a fresh drive belt every once in a while, change the oil in the bearing every few years, and that’s it.

The review turntable was used in a system with a PS Audio Stellar phono stage, icOn 4PRO Balanced line stage and Quiescent T100MPA monoblocks driving PMC MB2se speakers. This magazine and this reviewer have some history – of the good sort – with Origin Live. Alan Sircom evaluated an earlier model of the Sovereign, a Mk3.2 and the then top Origin Live arm, the Enterprise, in issue 140 and was very complementary about what he heard. I had owned an Origin Live Resolution turntable in its Mk2 guise for some five years in the early 2010s and then in 2018 reviewed a Calypso Mk4, second from bottom in the range.

The Sovereign S Mk5 triggered fond memories, exhibiting a familiar immediacy and strong sense of natural and neutral musicality. At the same time though, it sounded considerably more high-end, with greater levels of tonal and dynamic detail, superior rhythmic drive and a lower level of background noise. I had expected it to be good, but not that good. It was such a strong and refined performer that I was compelled to ponder just which elements of design and execution were responsible for the surprising uplift in sonic performance.

Platter matter

Arthur Khoubesserian of Pink Triangle is credited with identifying acrylic as presenting an almost perfect impedance match with vinyl records and therefore being the ideal material from which to make turntable platters. Still used by a number of turntable manufacturers, plain acrylic used to be the go-to material for Origin Live too, but Baker has in recent years put a lot of development effort into teaming acrylic with other materials to create platters that are multi-layer. The engineering principle here is that energy at the stylus tip not only travels up the cantilever to excite the cartridge coils but also travels downwards into the platter from where it can be reflected back out of phase to cause smearing and intermodulation errors.

Baker notes that metal alloy, glass and ceramic platters are the worst offenders, yet even acrylic exhibits this behaviour, but to a lesser degree. On the Sovereign S the platter has a 25mm-thick base of acrylic. Lifting off the flexible top mat, which appears to be a composite of cork and rubber, reveals three further visible layers; first a black composite that is laser-cut with hundreds of thin slots. Underneath that is a similar thickness of an unidentifiable second material, and under that is thin copper, precision cut, at least where it is visible, in a pattern of spokes radiating out from the platter spindle. The three layers are held secure to the acrylic substrate by a perimeter of nylon screws.

For the 2018 evaluation of the Calypso I had been lent a then current version of Baker’s multi-layer design and had been able to compare it to a plain acrylic platter. The multi-layer platter had stomped all over the plain acrylic one, giving dynamic and tonal detail at all frequencies much greater clarity. What particularly impressed was that the improvements were linear, not highlighting any particular frequencies.

Fast forward, and I was therefore not too surprised to find that the 2023 multi-layer platter moves sonic performance on further still. Baker has retained the linearity but at the same time extended the low-end and increased the texture of what we hear. The revised platter also seems to better preserve phase. Sound-staging, a strong suit of the original, sounded more confident and still more precisely drawn in depth and width.

Power broker

The power supply used in the Mk5 turntables is Baker’s own creation, but he is careful to make the point that power supply design is pretty much all prior art. Some buyers might regret that the funky blue illumination of the platter, a feature of the previous ‘light speed’ controller, is no more. In its place is a simpler current-loaded control circuit with a focus on the quality of the elements of the AC to DC conversion and on minimising Voltage ripple.

Baker says the revised power supply delivers just the same wow and flutter as the old light speed controller, but that doesn’t tell us the whole story. While there is no reason to doubt Baker’s claim, the Sovereign S Mk5 has an emphatic, almost relentless sense both of stability and drive that I felt sure eclipsed that of the older power supply design. There are multiple possible reasons for this; the circuit topology and the quality of the discrete components used to build it, the specially wound – Baker says uniquely – balanced transformer and even the cable taking the regulated voltage to the motor. As he notes: “All these things are interrelated and you’d be amazed at how much sonic difference they can make.”

Before the arrival of the Sovereign S, I had tried the Agile tonearm on two alternative turntables, and on one in particular had noted extremely low levels of groove rush. Fitted to the Sovereign S the Agile was quieter still between tracks. Groove rush is primarily the result of stylus jitter due to cartridge design, and so I am at a loss to explain how mounting the Agile on the Sovereign S had apparently reduced it. Nonetheless, the finding was undeniable, the lower surface noise allowing subtle musical details on familiar recordings to emerge with greater clarity.

Quality pressings of quality recordings assumed almost digital levels of blackness between notes with consequent benefits for apparent dynamic range. The Agile, teamed with the Sovereign S, also produced the deepest, most powerful and most richly textured low end that I have heard from any turntable, bar none.

Something else interesting emerged during the review listening sessions and it’s to do with length. Arms at 10 or 12 inches tend to offer a more relaxed sound than those at 9 or 9.5 inches. The 9.5 inch Agile, which had already confounded expectations when fitted to the two other turntables, did so again when teamed with the Sovereign S. Baker has somehow managed to give the Agile a Jekyll and Hyde-like character, combining a goodly helping of both worlds; fast transients and a sense of musical impulsion, but combined with a sense that everything is under perfect control and that there is all the time in the world for the next note to emerge.

Sweet return

The Sovereign S Mk5 turntable and Agile tonearm delivered hewn-from-rock speed stability and a sense of relentless natural drive coupled to strong dynamic expression, tonal density, dynamic agility and timing; a sweet return and a new high-water mark for vinyl playback.

Are there better turntables? Perhaps, but the remarkable thing is that for all its sonic high achievement, the Sovereign, even in its S-guise, is not costly when compared to top-of-the-range alternatives from other brands. For not a lot of money we get a beautifully conceived and built music machine whose form today is not the result of shameless plagiarism more than five decades ago, or the heedless following of fashion, but stems from proper engineering principles that have been further refined by a designer who is ever curious, thinks for himself, and pays scrupulous attention to detail.

In the context of today’s high-end turntable market Baker could charge a lot more for the Sovereign S Mk5 than he does. That he declines to do so tells us something else about him that some will admire, and buyers on the hunt for benchmark vinyl performance should have reason to be grateful for.

Technical specifications

• Type Skeletal Turntable with external DC motor belt drive & outboard balanced transformer
• Speed 33 &45rpm electronic switching
• Turntable body Single point cantilevered suspension, ultra low friction bearing, high performance armboard, heavyweight pods
• Plinth Steel between acrylic
• Multi-layer ‘S’ platter Acrylic, copper & composite layers
• Power supply MK5 PSU
• Tonearm Agile dual pivot tonearm
• Armtube Aerospace Metal Alloys, dampening layers & carbon fibre
• Arm cable Silver Hybrid-S internal/external
• Counterweight Multi-Layer counterweight with fine adjustment
• Effective Lengths Available 9”, 9.5” 10” & 12” (standard is 9.5”)
• Effective Mass 14.5 grams
• Weight 28.4 Kg
• Dimensions 500 x 190 x 380mm
• Price Sovereign S turntable £8,300 $10,500
  Agile tonearm (9.5 inch) £10,200 $12,910

Manufacturer

Origin Live

www.originlive.com 

+44 (0) 23 80578877

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