
This takes the form of a ring of TPE (Thermoplastic Elastomer) around the inner lip of the platter and it results in a pleasingly inert sound when you tap it.

The platter is made from steel, as it has been on many previous iterations but there is now additional dampening. The turntable to which this arm is attached is also recognisably a Debut but one that a fine tooth comb has been applied to.

The 2M Red can be found adorning turntables that cost rather more than this (although, for the sake of balance, my position is that this is proportionally about the ‘correct’ price to encounter it at), the Red can easily be upgraded to a 2M Blue via a stylus change and give yourself an instant performance boost without any cartridge changing taking place. The carbon fibre arm sees detailed improvementsĪs standard though, the Pro-Ject is fitted with an Ortofon 2M Red which is no slouch in its own right. In keeping it on the Debut, there is the suggestion that this is a turntable with a bit of stretch to it. This is something that Pro-Ject restricts or eliminates on their simpler arms because it adds cost, increases the complexity of setting it up and - in all honesty - won’t see much use. This is not the first time that a Debut has been sold with a carbon arm but this is the latest iteration of the breed with further tweaks to the basic design in the pursuit of higher performance.Īs well as notional performance advantages, the key attribute that this arm offers over simpler models we’ve looked at from Pro-Ject is that both tracking force and antiskate can be adjusted within a usefully wide range. The head shell is integrated with the rest of the tube and this helps to ensure that the assembly is stiff at all points and has consistent resonant behaviour. The arm is similar in basic construction to the one attached to the Classic Evo we looked at recently in that it takes a thin wall metal tube and uses a carbon fibre weave to add considerable stiffness without significant increases in mass.

Pro-Ject has been making use of carbon fibre in arms for well over a decade now and what began as a fairly expensive option for the premium models has expanded to the point where you can find it on a turntable that costs less than £500. Key to this is the arm, which is the reason why the Carbon Evo has ‘carbon’ in the name. This new Debut doesn’t do (much) more than the original but the manner in which it it does it has changed considerably. The nature of turntable specifications is that in reading a check sheet of the original 1998 Debut and the 2020 Debut Carbon Evo side by side, you might reasonably ask what the price hike is for (although, I’ll come to that price in a bit). Has the Pro-Ject’s journey from disruptive force to member of the establishment come at the expense of the magic that fuelled it in the first place? Time to cue it up and find out. Being a key part of the origins of the vinyl boom is great but it does mean that all the other companies helping to fuel it want a piece of the action too.
#Debut carbon evo upgrade
Instead, this is the turntable you might upgrade to after your first, that offers a bit of stretch to the design and that can respond to you making some specification changes rather than simply chopping it in and moving further up the pecking order. It is no longer the first rung, the plucky upstart you choose as your first turntable there are now three complete ranges below the Carbon Evo you see here. Since those early days, the role of the Debut in Pro-Ject’s range has changed. The success of the original Debut looks inevitable from 2020 but it really wasn’t at the time. I will go on record as saying I’m not as sure.

We can state with the sort of hindsight fueled assurance that we all fall into if we’re not careful, that it was inevitable that a device like the original Pro-Ject Debut would have been released by somebody. This, should you happen to have spent the 21 st century in a cave, is one of the pillars on which the vinyl revival is based. The Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo is an unsuspended, belt driven turntable and latest scion of the Debut line.
