Company & Product Overview

This is an overview of an updated version of a very highly regarded turntable from Cambridge Audio, the Alva TT V2 Turntable. Cambridge Audio introduced the original Alva TT at CES in 2019 and it garnered a “Best of Audio” award on the spot. The name for the Alva comes from Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the first phonograph. Since its release, it has been highly praised by reviewers all over the world. This was a pretty cool feat from a company not known for turntables. But if you know how the engineers at Cambridge Audio pride themselves on great sound, it is not really a surprise that they came up with such a high-performance and innovative turntable.

Cambridge Audio has been London-based since 1968 and was the first audio company to incorporate a toroidal transformer into an amplifier. Since then they have continued to produce award-winning electronics that are focused on providing outstanding value. They go so far as to listen to individual components when designing their electronic circuits. And to keep everyone’s ears tuned to what live music actually sounds like, the London office has weekly concerts on Friday afternoons focusing on a variety of different types of music.

The original Alva TT had a built-in phono preamp and had a pretty unique feature at its time for a turntable with the inclusion of AptX HD Bluetooth. Cambridge loves to listen to their users and the improvements we see on the Alva TT V2 are all based on feedback they received from the original Alva TT owners.

In this overview, we will go over the Alva TT V2 in general and talk about some of the upgrades and why they came about.

Design & Build Quality

The Alva TT V2 looks very similar to the original Alva TT, which in a nutshell is sleek and simple. The appearance reminds us of the look of the CX series products which have a rounded, floating appearance. The footprint that sits on your shelf is smaller than the plinth, which gives it that floating look just like CX. The bottom part of the plinth is a dark matte gray finish with a solid aluminum top plate. Three small silver buttons are on the left side for power and speed control with an elegantly embossed Cambridge logo on the right.

The Alva TT V2 is a manual turntable, which means you need to lower the tonearm using the cueing lever at the beginning and end of the record. The tonearm has tracking force and anti-skate adjustments. However, there is no way to adjust the tonearm height.

Learn More About Manual vs. Automatic Turntables

Cambridge Audio intentionally designed the Alva TT V2 to have an appearance that gives you the confidence that it’s easy to set up and put right to use. We love the minimalist appearance with its rounded corners and clean lines.

Build quality is very good, as we see with all of their gear. This is one stout turntable. The plinth without the platter weighs almost 16 pounds, and when you add the 5-pound platter, you are just shy of 21 pounds total. Cambridge Audio includes a nice set of audio interconnect cables and a ground wire with the turntable, which we felt would not really need to be upgraded compared to some products that come with throwaway cables. And in what has become their trademark back panel design, the labels are printed both right side up and upside down to make them easy to read when leaning over the top.

Features & Technology

The Alva TT V2 sits on four feet that have some damping characteristics and feel slightly squishy to the touch. As we said earlier, the plinth is quite beefy with its solid aluminum top plate and anti-resonant base.

The platter is made from Polyoxymethylene (POM), a high-tech engineering thermoplastic used in precision parts that require high stiffness and excellent dimensional stability. There is a metal insert in the center with a slight indentation for the record label. Like many turntables with a high-tech plastic-based platter, it is designed to be used without a mat. For those of you who like to roll your own sound by changing mats, you need to bear in mind the arm is not height-adjustable, so it's best to stick with no mat.

In a departure from most performance turntables, the Alva TT V2 uses a direct drive motor system. However, Cambridge Audio goes about direct drive quite differently. Most direct-drive turntables have a high torque motor and a fairly low mass platter so it will get up to speed instantly, which has made them a favorite of DJs. Cambridge goes in the opposite direction with a medium torque motor and a very high mass, almost 5-pound platter. It gets up to speed just a shade quicker than most belt-drive turntables, but Cambridge Audio claims this system produced as good or better speed consistency than any belt drive system they tried for the same money. Direct drive makes set up a bit simpler as you just drop the platter on and you never have to worry about replacing a belt.

Learn More About Belt-Drive vs. Direct-Drive Turntables

The tonearm for the new Alva TT V2 is where one of the biggest changes occurred. The original model used a Rega arm made for them which had a non-detachable headshell. Cambridge apparently got a lot of user requests for a detachable headshell to make it easier to switch cartridges. This does make some sense as the Alva TT came with a pretty high-end high output Alva MC moving coil cartridge. A lot of their users wanted to be able to throw on a less expensive cartridge for records that might not be in the best shape.

At first, we were not sure about this move as the Rega tonearm, in our opinion, was a super nice arm. But in our listening test, this new arm performed very well. We do wish they had provided a way to change the tonearm height since they made it so easy to swap out cartridges.

The Alva MC is a high output moving coil cartridge with an elliptical stylus and aluminum cantilever. We prefer the sound of moving coil cartridges, as, by design, they tend to extract more musical details from the vinyl.

The built-in phono preamp is based upon the very highly regarded Cambridge Audio Duo separate phono preamp. It is set up to be the perfect mate for the Alva MC and any other moving magnet cartridge you might want to use with a second headshell. This was really smart on their part by designing the high output Alva MC to use the same gain and loading settings as the majority of moving magnet cartridges out there.

Cambridge coined the phrase “Just Add Vinyl” for the original Alva TT with the concept that you could easily get music into any type of system with the Alva TT.

This is why they also include Bluetooth, but not just any Bluetooth, it is AptX HD, which means you will be streaming Bluetooth at hi-res 24bit/48kHz! Standard Bluetooth is pretty lossy, but AptX-HD is not and gets you fairly close to the sound of a physical connection. For someone with a great pair of Bluetooth headphones or speakers, all you need to add is the Alva TT V2 and some vinyl!

When the original Alva TT was introduced, it not only was simple to use, it shocked many listeners with how good it sounded just as a basic turntable. It turned out to be a fantastic turntable even when you used it without its Bluetooth feature. The Alva TT V2 gets two new features that let you take it even further.

You can now defeat the built-in phono preamp should you wish to connect it to a system that might have a better one or use a separate one. And, you can completely turn off the Bluetooth transmitter for a slight improvement in performance by shutting down that circuit completely.

Performance

Set up of the Alva TT V2 was pretty simple. We did have one bone to pick on the supplied cables. They had tiny little black and red rubber bands to indicate the channels. These fell off on ours, and fortunately, the cable itself has writing on only one channel, so we were able to use that to keep the left and right channels correct.

The table is supplied with an Ortofon stylus pressure gauge. You can use this to set the tracking force, but we found, even though the counterweight had no numbers on it, the large lines indicated .5 grams, so 4 large lines after we zeroed it out got us to 2 grams which we confirmed with the gauge.

Since the table is so heavy, we recommend you connect the cables and power it up first, then spin it into position for the rest of the setup. We go over how to set it up from start to finish in a separate video.

If you have followed some of our testing, you know we like to put units into systems better than they should be to see how they perform. In this case, we connected it up directly to a McIntosh C22 preamp, using the built-in McIntosh phono preamp, which is a darn good one. We were very interested to see if there would be major improvements using a much better phono preamp and we found this to be totally true, as you might expect. We heard more clarity, separation of instruments, and deep bass using the phono preamp in the C22.

Hearing the difference with Bluetooth turned on and off when using either with the built-in preamp or not, might have been slightly cleaner, or we could have just been fooling ourselves as we did not hear much change.

And speaking of Bluetooth, like most units in this category where you are connecting it to a pair of speakers or headphones, it is not as simple as connecting your phone to a Bluetooth device. You will need to turn off any Bluetooth device in your home that it can be paired with or the Alva TT V2 will likely jump to the wrong device. Once we did this, we were able to pair it up.

The outcome of this comparison was also as you might expect. We made this test with a pair of Sony wireless headphones connected hard-wired to the headphone connection on the C22, then listened with them in Bluetooth mode. The signal was more compressed and a bit edgy sounding compared to without Bluetooth, but this was not a surprise.

The Alva MC cartridge tracks really well and gave us quite a bit of inner detail, especially when using the C22 phono preamp. The table overall has a decent sense of rhythm and pacing, something Cambridge is well known for in their electronics. Dynamics and drive to our ears could have been better, but again we were comparing it to a $10,000 turntable/cartridge combination.

Conclusion

If you are shopping for a good turntable in this price range and could care less about Bluetooth, there are probably better choices out there. Not by a mile, but this price range is very competitive with a lot of great turntables.

However, the Alva TT V2 sounds surprisingly good for a Bluetooth turntable, by far the best we have heard. We feel for the user who wants something built like a tank, that is simple to set up, and very easy to use (once you pair the Bluetooth), it is the best in that class. So if you have a great pair of Bluetooth speakers and just want to add vinyl, it is a pretty cool way to go. Or, if you wanted to roam around your house listening to vinyl using wireless headphones, then settle down with your system, it can do both, and in that regard, nothing can touch it.

Then, when you add in the fact that this is a high-performance turntable that requires no finicky setup, you have something very appealing for someone who just wants to know it works the way it should.