Signature Tonearms 12″

Signature tonearms: Beautiful pieces of design and mechanics

The Pro-Jects tonearm philosophy normally uses stiff, one piece, mid to light weight designs with Cardan pin point bearing. This tonearms perform best with all MM cartridges and MC cartridges with middle compliance. They are responsible for our famous lively, fast and dynamic sound, even in lower price ranges. A unique counterweight construction allows you to balance cartridges from 5 up to 25 grams (excluding headshell) depending on weight of the chosen headshell (up to 37 grams with ´Alu´, up to 39 grams with ´Carbon´, up to 41 grams with ´Wood´). So, this is also an ideal tonearm for direct mounting of SPU cartridges.

However the high-end analogue market has moved to a more classic design and use of relatively heavy cartridges with low compliance and low resonance frequency. This allows big sound on big systems. Such cartridges need a heavier arm with more internal damping. Additionally, many customers today want to use different cartridges with different sound types depending on the music style. For this you need a detachable headshell to ensure easy and quick changeovers.

We use different alloys of metal and aluminium, all worked on the highest precision CNC machine with diamond cutters. The classic S-shaped tonearm tube is made from special aluminium with highest internal damping. To keep the speed of the Pro-Ject sound, we use a special oil-damped uni pivot design. Most common S-shape arms use ball race bearings with much higher friction, which tends to sound slow in an arm with high effective mass. To make the installation of different cartridges even easier, you can adjust overhang at the tonearmbase and adjust the VTA via a hand-set without any additional tool. It´s easy and superfast!

Available as an option: alternative headshells
The tonearm is delivered with one diamond-cut alu headshell with 12-grams mass. To maximise the sound options and allow optimum cartridge headshell weight and resonance combinations we also offer two different even more lightweight headshells as an option: Carbon and Wood. They all give a different sound. You easily can ´tune´ the effective mass of the arm according to the compliance of the cartridge to reach an optimum resonance frequency.