Hadcock The late George Hadcock designed and made tone arms for more than 30 years. The Unipivot design, regarded by many vinyl aficionados as the best sounding of all arm types, was Georges' specialty. With his son Charles now in control a new sense of purpose has been found in the range of tonearms, and a new ISO quality control system is in place, ensuring that every hand made arm meets the exacting standards that has not always been there. So think again and consider the unipivot Hadcock and you will not be disappointed by what you get. superb build quality, and a sonic image that has beguiled audiophiles for more than 3 decades, and for very good reason. The range we offer encompasses a sensible price range, giving the listener the option of ever increasing quality. Alterations are based upon arm tube length, either 228.6, or 243.8mm and type of internal and external wiring. Ranging from simple copper, through Incognito, to Van Den Hul silver cable. The new Hadcock with the choice of pure copper cable such as the Hadcock 242 Export, has been awarded the HiFi World Award as best tonearm 2004. A full range of accessories and spare parts are available allowing the user the opportunity to fix the arms to all types of decks. from Garrard, Origin Live, Project, Rega and Roxan, through to SME, Avid, Thorens and Technics to name but a few.

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Hadcock Reviews

Hadcock GH242 SE Tonearm by Roy Gregory
Hi-Fi+, Issue 13 - Sep / Oct 2001

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an aphorism that could be applied a little more diligently to the world of hi-fi, along with that other perennial chestnut, "There's nothing new under the sun". As an industry we seem to forget more than we ever learn about the art of making music in the home, and more often than not, each new miracle cure or product turns out to be some old, established idea or technology simply recycled and rebadged. Of course some of them never went away, they just shrank a little (or in some cases a lot) from the glare of the fashionable spotlight. The Hadcock arms are a classic example. Long declared dead and laid to rest in their UK home market, they have, nonetheless, soldiered happily along overseas. But what goes around comes around (never let it be said that I crossed the road to avoid a cliche) and the Hadcock is back, selling again in its native Isles.

Of course, whether or not you considered it "broke" in the first place depends on your point of view. Alongside SME, the Hadcock tonearms used to be amongst the most successful on the UK market. However, the advent of the LP12, and more importantly the Grace G707 and Linn Ittok arms saw a sea change in favour of gimbal bearings for use on the nervous suspended decks that rapidly became de riguer. Uni-pivots, for such were the Hadcocks, craved rather more stability than they got from a lightweight three-point suspended sub-chassis, and their performance suffered accordingly. Sensibly they emigrated to Germany and Japan, where high-mass decks still held sway (or rather didn't, if you get my drift). Even a brief and probably ill-advised flirtation with fixed bearings in the GH220 couldn't stop the rot, and Hadcock all but disappeared from view. But fashion is nothing if not predictable, and yo these many years later, high-mass turntables and unipivot arms are back in vogue, even if the current incumbents do borrow wholesale from the archaeological store chest of hi-fi's history. The Hadcock GH242 is an exception to that rule; it is hi-fi history. If you don't believe me just take a look on page 95 of Hi-Fi Choice number 24. There you'll see the GH228 Export, a 9" dead-ringer for the 10" 242 I've got in front of me. Oh, there are differences. The 242 uses a stainless steel armtube rather than the aluminum alloy one on the 228, which also accounts for the change from black to the current chrome finish. This also increases the effective mass slightly, making the arm happier with today's lower compliance cartridges. However, the bearing and the mechanical structure of the arm are, to all intents and purposes, identical, so I guess that's where we should start.

Ah yes, the performance. The GH242 had the unenviable task of stepping into the shoes vacated by my VPI JMW 12.5, as 12" unipivot that costs about three times the price of the Hadcock. Under the circumstances, it handled a potentially difficult situation with aplomb, offering a different but equally valid view of musical events. Score one for the underdog.

The Hadcock was happiest with the Music Maker, a combination that made the most of the cartridge's tonal and organic qualities, creating a potent cocktail with the 242's dynamic life and transparency. Together they are capable of challenging (and occasionally embarrassing) the musical virtues of many a highly touted and extortionately priced combination. Deeply unfashionable (a moving-iron cartridge in an unashamedly dated tonearm) they more than make up in performance what they like in audiophile credibility. Many a vaunted arm has struggled to decipher Neil Young's Sleeps With Angels . The Hadcock might skate over some of the more excessive bass abuse, but the diction ands separation of the vocals is never in question. Midrange is where the music is, and it's what the 242 excels at.

It used to be difficult to recommend a sensible and cost effective upgrade from Rega. Not anymore. On the right deck and loaded with the right cartridge the Hadcock offers performance and musical integrity way beyond its price. Not as pretty as a Morch or as solid as an SME 309, it outperforms either when it comes to delivering the essence of a musical performance. They say you can't teach old dogs new tricks. On the evidence of the GH242, perhaps you don't need to.


HiFi World
Hadcock GH242 SE Tonearm
Put The Right Arm In, by Richard White

Richard White sticks his arm out to hail the latest unipivot offering from G.C. Hadcock, the GH242 SE.
Unipivot arms have, as the name implies, one universal pivot which permits the arm to rock about the bearing in any direction. it's an attractive arrangement in many ways: for a start, it's simple; second, provided that the bearing is properly designed and made, friction can be minimized to exceptionally low figures. Lastly, the set-up is inherently self-balancing - there is no tendency for gravity, acting through a fixed-axis pivot point, to push the arm across the record in either direction.

All this care in design and manufacture need not, of course, produce a listenable result. How does it sound ? Properly speaking, it doesn't. For an arm which will happily carry rather stiff MCs right the way to exceedingly compliant (30c.u.+) variable reluctant types, the Hadcock 242's modesty is startling. Having tried it out with an extensive variety of cartridges, from a £30 MM Stanton to a £1700 MC van den Hul, all I can report is that, if the Hadcock is adding any coloration, the result is only an improvement. As regards its tracking ability, the new geometry is spot on, with the inner zero error point coinciding with the 'worst' groove on most LP records - a very happy result.

The Hadcock's price is roughly comparable with the Rega 900 and the SME 300 range and, in my opinion, it is both more versatile and more able than either. In truth its performance places it in a higher class altogether. All-in-all, whether you view it as a bargain high-ender or as an improbably musical medium-pricer, the GH242SE deserves a long blissful listen.

Top marks from HiFi World


Hadcock GH242 SE Tonearm
by Edward Barker sixmoons.com

The images produced were beautifully stable, poised and attentive. The Hadcock turned out to be far less temperamental than the Moerch UP4 I lived with and loved, but sported the same gorgeous midrange. At the same time, bass was considerably more present and well defined. The Moerch, with its S-shaped arm wand and lowered counterweight was less happy tracking warped records and probably wasn't as good a tracker in the first place. The 242SE's take is altogether more assured. Like the Moerch, the Hadcock presents an ever so subtle lifting of the leading edges. Could that be due to the stainless-steel arm wands they both have in common? It gave Boccherini's "La Musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid" (that's "The Night Music of the Streets of Madrid") on Die Röhre - The Tube [Tacet L74] a delightful vibrancy at the expense of what I perceive to be "neutrality".

But on this record, the Hadcock also produced something close to the levels of deep jet blackness the Schroder achieves. When the violins are nail-plucked, the ticking sounds were full of the harmonic structure standing out from the silence. The inter-relationship between melody and countermelody was beautifully rendered, rhythms well caught and delineated. Instruments appeared well separated and with a good three-dimensional harmonic envelope. Boccherini's resolute bass motif came forward with full weight and scale. Time to smile, and smile big.

I evaluated the Hadcock with several cartridges, from the Allaerts MC1S to the Music Maker 2 (an unusually brilliant match), from a Scheu-modded Benz Glider to a high-compliance Van den Hul Empire MC1000. The arm easily distinguished the sonic character of each one. If it imparted a sonic character of its own, I would place it as giving forth a sense of purposeful energy, but one that has not lost poise and control. The slight lift of leading edges remained apparent with all cartridges.


TNT-Audio
Hadcock GH242 Pure Silver Tonearm
by Geoff Husband - TNT France TNT-Audio, Dec 2002

In my last review I described the Morsiani unipivot as the most musical arm I'd heard, dodging many Hi-Fi attributes for a unique ease and flow. The Hadcock goes completely the other way, taking on gimballed arms such as the SME4 and Artemiz head-to-head. With the Music Maker on board the result is that the information retrieval is astonishing. Here is a unipivot that will drag every ounce of detail from your records, it seeks out leading edges so making it incredibly fast - it seems bursting with energy, only the Artemiz comes close.

The Hadcock 242 Silver is not cheap. In fact it costs much the same as an SME4. Where the '4' looks a million dollars, the Hadcock looks a little eccentric. But on the Michell Orbe at least, the 242 Silver is a clear winner on sound quality. The Morsiani I preferred to the SME as well, but in that case it was hard to judge as it was so different, all I can say was it made me want to play more music. The Hadcock on the other hand was an easy comparison because it simply did what the SME did - better. That the thing is simple to set up, should last forever and is rather different from the rest of the herd is just the icing on the cake.

And now my system has a new "reference" for others to beat. The Hadcock with either the Music Maker or the XX-2 cleans up the bottom end of the Orbe and just makes music so much fun, so that the SME has to take third place. That my two favourite arms are unipivots is significant, I'm not saying that a unipivot is a guarantee of quality (I didn't much like the Kuzma), but those "flat earthers" that have been banging on about them for the last 20 years obviously have something going for them.
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