Black Friday week is being pretty kind to hi-fi so far, mostly thanks to many of the specialist hi-fi retailers' commitment to the annual sale. The best Black Friday hi-fi deals so far include £50 off our favourite budget speakers, £170 off former favourites from Bowers & Wilkins, and £200 off various Cambridge Audio components. And you can add a few Technics deals to that heavenly haul too. That's right, a handful of price cuts on Technics gear have caught our eye while perusing the sales.
The first is £200 off the multi-Award-winning Technics SL-1500C turntable with free Sennheiser headphones thrown in. Its current What Hi-Fi? Award speaks for itself: this is a class-leading record player for its price, made all the more compelling thanks to this discount and freebie.
And then you have the phono stage-less SL-100C turntable down to £799 (from £950) and the SA-C100 streaming system down to £699 (from £850). Both are more affordable siblings of products that are not only tried-and-tested five-star performers but also current What Hi-Fi? Award winners. Of course, that isn't to say that the SA-C100 system and SL-1000C record player are necessarily class leaders at their respective price points too, but it's fair to say that their Premium Class family's success suggests they could be very decent indeed.
Last but not least if you're in the market for earbuds, the original, noise-cancelling EAH-AZ60 are only £119 thanks to a 40 per cent discount, while their slightly improved, impressive successors are just £30 more.
Technics scooped two 2022 and 2023 What Hi-Fi? Awards for its £899 SA-C600 streaming amplifier and £1099 SL-1500C turntable. The latter even took home the most esteemed 'Product of the Year' gong in the hi-fi system category. So you could say the SA-C100 and SL-100C above, from Technics' same Premium Class product series, come from a solid heritage.
The SA-C100 is a just-add-speakers system about as well-spec'd as they come, offering myriad streaming support, physical connections for hooking up a turntable, TV or other audio component, and – rare for such systems – an integrated CD drive. We can't vouch for its sound performance, which will likely be inferior to the SA-C600's due to a discrepancy in the units' internal components – this is a more affordable system, after all. But if it's tuned similarly you can expect an expressive, punchy and ultimately entertaining sound.
As for the SL-100C deck, it is a follow-up to the SL-1500C and therefore shares much of its DNA. It has the same iron-coreless direct-drive motor designed to avoid issues such as cogging and speed control, plus a version of the company’s long-running S-shaped aluminium tonearm. Technic’s in-house developments in platter design are carried over with a two-layer structure combining deadened rubber and aluminium, too, though the main differences lie in its lack of a phono stage and use of an Audio-Technica as opposed to an Ortofon cartridge.
The earbuds are both recommendable at their Black Friday discount too, though it's the latest (MK2) version we'd go for if you can afford them. The EAH-AZ60M2 may not be as subtle or exciting to listen to as the class-leading £219 Sony WF-1000XM5, but they're still upbeat, detailed and entertaining to listen to and impress with several features, including a 25-hour battery life and the ability to switch effortlessly between up to three sources via Bluetooth without having to manually set the connection every time.
MORE:
Read our Technics SA-C600 review and Technics SL-1500C review
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