Company & Product Overview
With vinyl sales the highest they’ve been in decades, there is certainly no shortage of turntables on the market to choose from. While roaming the halls of CES 2017, we came across a product lineup fairly new to the US that caught our attention for it’s very high build-quality and attention to detail. When we walked into their suite, EAT was a name we had heard for years, but we had never had the opportunity to take a hard look at their products. After hearing the history of the company, we knew we were in good hands.
EAT is an acronym for European Audio Team. In the 1990’s demand for high-quality vacuum tubes was on the rise. A company called VAIC located in the Czech Republic was making waves for some amazing handbuilt tubes. Jozefina Lichtenegger was getting her MBA in Economics and interestingly enough, her sister was married to the owner of VAIC. She started helping out the family business and their reputation grew. After almost 16 years making tubes, VAIC faded away but Jozefina arranged a buyout of Tesla Vrsovice, a large tube maker in Prague, to continue with production of these great tubes. Soon after this, she designed a tube phono stage and tonearm and EAT was born.
This was followed by some very well made high-end turntables. In 2003, while Jozefina was looking for distributors, she met Heinz Lichtenegger, the director of Pro-Ject Audio Systems. Pro-ject is one of the largest high-performance audio manufacturers in the world today and their Debut Carbon turntables are legendary for their great performance and value. They have a huge factory in Prague.
They were soon married and quickly drew a line in the sand, agreeing not to create competing products and to run their businesses separately. EAT does benefit, however, from having the large-scale Pro-ject production facilities available to them. It really is a great story, and EAT today still hand blows some of the best vacuum tubes in the world.
While it’s more of an entry model in their lineup, the C-Sharp turntable, which we will be reviewing today, is by no means an entry-level turntable. It’s an extremely well-made manual turntable that even comes with a $1,000 Ortofon Quintet Black moving coil cartridge. It is also the best-selling turntable in EAT’s lineup of tables which run from $1,495 all the way up to around $20,000.
Design & Build Quality
When we first looked at the EAT turntables, two things really impressed us — the great looking design and the superb build quality. They just exude European precision. Like many of our favorite turntables, the C-Sharp is a fully manual turntable. This means to operate it you’ll turn it on, manually lower the tonearm using the damped cueing lever, then at the end of your record, use the cueing lever again to raise the arm. At Audio Advice we prefer manual tables for their simplicity. There’s an argument to be made that the lack of mechanical parts also prevents issues such as resonance from affecting the tables great sound.
The look of the C-Sharp is quite stunning. Unlike many high-end turntables, the C-Sharp is elegant and relatively low-profile. The carbon fiber plinth sits in a high-gloss black base with a thin edge. The platter is much larger than a 12” record and tapers up to the high tech mat. A substantial record clamp is included in the box. The tonearm is also a work of art, constructed from carbon fiber and highly-polished aluminum components. The whole thing looks like something you would expect to find under the hood of a $1m race car!
As soon as you begin to interact with the C-Sharp it quickly becomes clear that build quality it is second to none. This is to be expected for it’s nearly $3,500 price point, but it’s just an incredibly well put together table.
