EAT announces its cheapest turntable yet, the £999 Prelude

When we reviewed our first EAT product, the B-Sharp Super Pack turntable, last spring, we all agreed on two things: that the company name was odd (it stands for ‘European Audio Team’), and that the turntable sounded very competitive for its £1370 price tag.

Fast forward almost a year and we have news of EAT’s cheapest turntable yet.

The Prelude is the high-end turntable brand’s first deck under £1000 - priced £999, it just avoids a four-figure sticker. It features a heavy platter to help ensure speed accuracy, a single-piece, lightweight carbon tonearm tube, which the company says is ideal for reducing resonances with moving-magnet cartridges, and a pre-fitted Ortofon 2M Red MM cartridge that we know is pretty good.

EAT has chosen to use the same base material found in its higher-end designs - a stainless steel bearing in a soft bronze bushing. And rather than finish its chassis with a veneer has instead gone with the more sophisticated method of applying eight layers of piano lacquer to the MDF base.

The motor is free-standing so that it doesn’t pass vibrations to the board, and the inclusion of a mass bearing block for the tonearm and counterweight works to absorb resonances from the cartridge. An anti-resonator damper on the counterweight aims to limit inherent resonances, too.

The EAT Prelude turntable is available from next month for £999.

EAT has also introduced a new £1249 valve-based phono stage, which is available now. 

The E-Glo Petit – the smaller sibling of the company’s E-Glo S – has a hybrid tube design with 12AX7 valves protruding from the top plate. A specially designed power supply enables the tubes to remain ‘hot’ at all times and therefore perform at their optimum throughout listening, while the use of J-FET transistors delivers a signal-to-noise ratio of only 87 decibels. 

The E-Glo Petit is compatible with MM and MC cartridges, and offers adjustable impedance and capacitance controls.

MORE: Best turntables 2019: Budget, mid-range, high-end

Becky Roberts

Becky is the managing editor of What Hi-Fi? and, since her recent move to Melbourne, also the editor of Australian Hi-Fi magazine. During her 10 years in the hi-fi industry, she has been fortunate enough to travel the world to report on the biggest and most exciting brands in hi-fi and consumer tech (and has had the jetlag and hangovers to remember them by). In her spare time, Becky can often be found running, watching Liverpool FC and horror movies, and hunting for gluten-free cake.