Analog Gear News

Let’s get vertical! We didn’t want to let our CES 2025 coverage pass without mentioning Fuse Audio and their visually enticing line of vertical turntables.

At CES 2025 — which officially got underway for press types like back on January 5, and wrapped up just a few days ago on January 10, 2025, mainly at the LVCC in Las Vegas and the Venetian towers — Fuse Audio showed off its litany of vertical turntable options on the show floor in Booth 30127. In the YouTube clip below, you can get a sense of what their brand-new, soon-to-be-shipping GLD vertical table is all about.

Back in the fall of 2024, Fuse Audio — which was founded in 2016 and is headed by Joseph Wu — undertook a Kickstarter campaign to fund the GLD. At the time of this posting, the GLD Kickstarter shows over $627,000 in pledged funds (whereas the initial funding goal was a “mere” $10K!) from over 2,500 backers. According to the company, the GLD’s tonearm has been upgraded from its initial spec. In their parlance, “After over six months in design and testing, the new tonearm provides improved balance for tracking force, ensuring even smoother playback.” The refined GLD table’s design also includes a “slightly adjusted” headshell angle for the supplied Audio-Technica AT3600L cartridge (all seen in action in the YouTube clip above).

The Fuse Audio GLD table boasts a mid-century modern design with an ashtree wood veneer finish, and is available in black and gold trims. The GLD is also Bluetooth-capable and comes with two external 36W speakers, each of them featuring a 1in tweeter (8ohms; 10Wx2) and 4in woofer (4ohms; 30Wx2).

Other specs for the GLD vertical table include playback speeds of 33, 45, and 78rpm, power consumption of 50W, RMS output power of 36Wx2, power supply input of 100-240V ~ 0.8A max, and power supply output of 15V 2.4A. Dimensions for the GLD are 14.17 x 8.39 x 14.45in (w/h/d), and its weight is given as 18lb.

Finally, the SRP for the GLD turntable is $349.

Visually speaking, it’s certainly quite enjoyable to watch color vinyl and/or and picture discs spin like they do on the GLD and other Fuse Audio vertical tables, and perhaps this is yet another way to entice newbies into joining in on the fun aspect of our vinyl-centric culture and feature tables like these in social settings. Spinning LPs vertically is admittedly more of an aesthetic choice, rather than a playback-quality-driven action. What say you? Feel free to add your thoughts about the potential bigger-picture implications of vertical LP playback in the Comments section below.

For more about Fuse Audio, go here.
To order a GLD turntable directly from Fuse Audio, go here.