Max Townshend told me some months ago that his new turntable was going to be more 'affordable' than the famous Rock Reference of a few years ago. In a flash of inspiraton I started privately calling it the Arkansas, ('Little Rock'?). Alas, in reality it's simply Rock III.

To be accurate, this £799 motor unit it is supplied without a lid or tonearm, though provision can be made for Linn type arms, Regas or SMEs - is Son of Rock out of Seismic Sink. Anyone who has known either will see the resemblance. The base is a tray with three adjustable feet - like the Sink. Above is the main chassis of damped 3m steel, isolated and 'suspended' on a kind of pneumatic inner tube - like the Sink, Elite Rock reminiscences are invoked by the Townshend trough, a curved 'drinking trough' filled with viscous silicone fluid in which a spindle attached to an outrigger bolted to the headshell sits. Townshend has long been an advocate of damping a tonearm at the headshell rather then the pivot end, and there are enough owners of Rocks and Rock References to support the theory wholeheartedly.

If to some extent the original Rock inolved a rethink on the ways a turntable functions, then using the Rock III also involves a spot of re-training. The trough is swung out; the LP placed on the platter; the clamp screwed down on the threaded spindle; the trough swung over the LP; the arm cued down onto the record. In practice this takes less time to do than describe, however fiddly it seems. If nothing else, it adds a little extra ritual to what Daniel Schaar of Micromega referred to as the 'ceremony' attendant on playing vinyl in an interview with Hi-Fi World a while ago.

The new Rock's fundamental ablility is to trot, canter or gallop along with the music precisely as required. Its sheer rhymthmical deftness is a joy to hear. it pulls off that rare high-end trick of announcing that musicians are playing together in perfect time. It has the knack of rounding them out into three dimensional beings, and is one of the best sources I know (including the few CD players and DACs that manage it) at reproducing acoustical space in a recording. If you want a flavour of Abbey Road No 1 Studio off an EMI recording, the Rock III fills the room with its signature. As they say, Iíve bin there, heard it.

It isn't just expansive studio space, either, that the Rock III recreates in the living room. One of the fascinating aspects of the journey of rediscovery that attends all record playing on a top turntable, even in this jaded digital age, is to hear clearly the different acoustic in which solo instruments had been recorded. As with all good replay sources, however, this insight never detracts from the whole perfomance. The Rock holds music together as though it's been shrink wrapped.

In some ways, its 'togetherness' is disconcerting. At times, particulary with some Rock or Pop recordings, there appeared to be a degree of lateral spatial compression. This is not a turntable that is kind and forgiving to either half-baked mixing desks or squashed and compressed mixes. Stadium rock - like early U2 - sounds as though it's in a stadium, but P.J. Harvey's 'Rid of Me' sounded like AM radio, and I felt well rid of it after just a couple of tracks.

This first impression took a knock with classical orchestral recordings which burgeoned out into the room beyond the 'speakers in all possible directions. What the Rock is doing, in much the same way that the original did, is focussing individual images extremely tightly with oodles of air and space around them. The backing vocalists on Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' simply strode right into the room, apparently bringing the studio ambience with them. This even transformed some of EMI's wooolier recordings, like the Previn 'Alexander Nevsky'. Where on most turntables the chorus is fairly diffuse, the Rock III managed to separate the component voices in a surprisingly intelligible way.

Where it was a little hard to come to terms with was on Pollini's DG recording of Stravinsky's 'Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka'. Rhythmically, the Towndshend turntable kept up with Pollini's extraordinary dexterity like an express train.  The apparent physical scale of the piano was somewhat shrunken compared to what I'm used to hearing, but so precise was the image it was practically measurable. The surrounding acoustic was also extraordinarily holistic, stretching from the outer edges of each speaker. In combination, the two are unnerving, liable to lead the unwary into suspecting an overly artificial constraint, but in all probability echoed the studio sound quite truthfully, if perhaps also too unflatteringly.

After a while, it dawned that many other turntables produce blurry images, or slightly exaggerated ones, Partly, this is responsible for the impression of rhythmical tautness and the feeling that the Rock III is incapable of missing a beat. Much of this lasting impression is reinforced by the sheer bass control, where the chassis construction, damping and the trough are obviously playing a major part.

As far as I could see - or rather hear - there was no reason to doubt the Rock III could deliver bass notes down as far as they can be recorded. A rarely-used test record is a Decca SXL of Bach organ music - rarely used because some powerful low D's and E's tend to make me fear for the survival of my ESL-63s. But there was strong evidence that this turntable was going to have no difficulty in reproducing bass notes down into the thirties (of Hertz) with perfect control. The upper end, however, was curtailed by comparison, but when this recording was made, Decca's Neumann lathe was much more confident at the lower frequency extremes than the upper ones, and the Rock simply refused to enhance the top end.

Cartridges, thanks to the trough, tracked like trains. They also glaringly display their own strengths and weaknesses; cheap and cheerful needles need not apply. I worked with a £115 Ortofon MC15 Super and a £480 Credo moving-coil from Switzerland as well as a somewhat world-weary Koetsu Black whose wear the Rock laid bare with distressing cruelty. Even with the budget Rega RB300 supplied with my turntable, all the virtues of the Rock kept coming through. The bass stayed firm and strong with - everyone says it, but itís true - CD-like clarity, the mid-range crisp, the rhythms fast, string tone sweet. I've heard it give other turntables in the same price bracket - with pricier arms - more than a run for their money in these terms. But it does need to be approached without preconception. It rewrites some of the turntable-building rules; it changes the way you listen to LPs as well.

TECHNICAL SINIPPETS

The inverted main bearing, derivied from the Elite Rock and Rock Reference runs on a tungsten-carbide thrust pad and is cut with a spiral groove to carry the oil upwards.

No springs, sorbothane, or foam in the suspension. A 3mm steel plate forms the sub-chassis, damped with pads and standard-grade chipboard, floating on an inflated 'inner tube'. The Rock III is one of the most vibration-resistant turntables around, taking a very hefty belt even to marginally disturb the stylus. Future production models will have an indicator light next to the on/off switch, which will fail to light if the airbag needs re-inflating after a year or two. The bicycle pump is not supplied...

Speed-change is manual, requiring the precision-ground flat belt to be moved down to the lower step of the pulley, positioned accessibly outside the rim of the platter. The main platter is cast and turned acrylic which sits on an aluminium and brass sub-platter which carries the belt.

The motor is the 24-pole synchronous Airpak used by a number of other turntable manufactures.

The other essential difference: the Townshend Trough. Original cast metal, the new version looks much the same, but is moulded plastic. Filled to within a millimetre or two of the lip with silicone fluid, a spindle attached to an outrigger arm from the headshell applies damping as the stylus tracks the groove. This holds the arm firm and damps the arm/cartridge resonance, typically 10Hz. Intriguingly, my ESL-63s provided  a convincing demonstration that this works, reproducing an impure violin from one turntable, and a notably purer one from the Rock III.

Levelling is provided through three adjustable feet and a built-in spirit level.

And the final part of the Rock V vinyl ritual: a record clamp which screws quickly onto a threaded spindle.