Show Reports

Hello and welcome to Part 8 of my Florida International Audio Expo 2025 show report, which is the final installment in this series. Here, I get to check out a Soulines turntable, Electrocompaniet phono preamp, Triangle speakers, and more.

SOULINES / ELECTROCOMPANIET
In Room 419, Jason Tavares of New York’s HiFi Loft remarked that the Florida show was a fun one — more laid-back than most. To that end, I enjoyed a relaxed visit in the demo room where he was stationed along with distributor Frank Gazzo of Antal Audio Group, here representing Triangle, and Lasse Danielsen, Electrocompaniet’s sales and marketing director.

Soulines — pronounced like it’s two words; i.e., soul lines — is a small company based in Belgrade, Serbia. Their turntables are handmade, hand-assembled by one individual, Tavares told me. Perhaps the company is best known for their Kubrick DCX turntable, named for the space station in the classic 1968 Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The model shown at FLAX was the newer top-of-the-line Soulines tt42 turntable ($14,500; FLAX show price: $13,000). The “42” in the name of this belt-driven table is a nod to the number referenced in Douglas Adams’ 1979 sci-fi classic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as a significant figure.

In this demo, the tt42 table was fitted with an Acoustic Signature TA-1000 NEO tonearm and a Luxman LMC-5 MC cartridge. The small-footprint tt42 comes with two pods for two tonearms (as seen above) and everything needed to mount two arms, including a variety of arm-board plates for different types of arms — SME, Rega, Linn/Jelco/Ortofon, etc. Custom plates are also available.

The second arm attaches to part of a sub-plinth off the back. “It’s a really ingenious design,” Tavares noted. It’s intended to make user setup straightforward. Soulines also recently introduced their own tonearm that Tavares said he’ll have at AXPONA in Schaumburg, Illinois, next month.

Aluminum is the tt42’s main material, with a series of subplates with combined dampening material, including rubber and cork, between each layer. The platter is clear acrylic, which picks up the hue of color vinyl to pleasing effect. (See it in action, above.) The brushless DC motor is integrated, again involving dampening material. “The designer doesn’t like to do outboard motors because he wants a table that is easy to set up, easy to move, and easy to level — because both have to be leveled independent of each other,” Tavares explained. The tt42’s feet have isolation built in as well. “It’s actually really well-dampened,” he continued. “I mean, I can change a CD in the shelf below it, and the record [that’s playing] doesn’t skip at all.”

Next in the playback chain was an Electrocompaniet ECP 2 MK II phono preamp ($2,900; FLAX show price: $2,400). The MK II update came out in 2020. The internal electronics are all balanced, pure Class A throughout. It’s designed and made in Norway, including the chassis, circuit boards, electronics, etc. Electrocompaniet’s in-house software team developed the control app.

The ECP 2 MK II has a single analog input pair and a pair each of XLR and RCA outputs. Also on the back panel are dip switches that allow the user to adjust settings for MM and MC cartridges, along with gain. “It had full compliance through the RIAA standard, so it has a low-pass filter and all these things built into it,” Electrocompaniet’s sales and marketing director Lasse Danielsen told me. “It’s very configurable, so it should support just about any cartridge on the planet.” One exception is optical cartridges, Danielsen added, but that EQ tech will be incorporated down the line — though he can’t yet say when. “We will do that in the next product we come out with,” Danielsen noted. He also reported that talks with DS Audio are underway. Additionally, Electrocompaniet provided other amplification and digital sources for the demo. Cabling was from Nordost.

The demo system brought together components that all had sleek designs. Antal Audio Group distributor Frank Gazzo showed two pairs of the French manufacturer Triangle’s speakers — their 40th Anniversary Magellan Duetto bookshelf models ($7,000/pr; FLAX show price: $5,800/pr), and the active Capella Bluetooth speakers ($3,000/pr; FLAX show price: $2,400/pr) — in a cool-looking, mottled-pattern Astral Blue finish.

And the sound? When I stopped by the room, the Triangle Magellans were ready for action. I took out that favorite all-analog Tony Allen album of mine again, 2017’s The Source 2LP set on Blue Note, and had them spin “Ewajo” (LP2, Side D, Track 2). A liquid continuity shone through that track’s atypical rhythms and time signatures. The stand-mounted Triangle speakers’ dispersion and energy belied their size, filling the room with the players’ bold brass tones and polyrhythmic energy. Treble sounded smooth on saxes. Meanwhile, Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” (the title track to their 1981 Warner Bros. LP, which was more recently reissued in 2020 by Kling Klang/Parlophone) sprung to life with relentlessly punchy synth beats delivered with even-handed stability — and fun.

And that’s officially a wrap on our FLAX 2025 coverage. Next month, we’ll have more in-depth coverage from the aforementioned AXPONA in Schaumburg, Illinois, so stay tuned!

Author bio: Julie Mullins, a lifelong music lover and audiophile by osmosis who grew up listening to her father’s hi-fi gear, is also a contributing editor and reviewer on our sister site, Stereophile, for whom she also writes the monthly Re-Tales column. A former fulltime staffer at Cincinnati’s long-running alt-weekly CityBeat, she hosts a weekly radio show on WAIF called On the Pulse.

For Part 1 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 2 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 3 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 4 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 5 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 6 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 7 of Julie’s FLAX 2025 show report, go here.

For Ken Micallef’s 15-minute video showing all sorts of great turntables and other cool analog gear at FLAX 2025, go here.

For even more FLAX 2025 coverage, go here on our sister site Stereophile.