Clearaudio TT5 test: passive tangential tonearm with V4 stainless steel ball bearings

The Clearaudio TT5 is part of the biggest tonearm comparison that LowBeats has ever done. It exclusively uses Clearaudio tonearms; in addition to their eleven turntables, 17 cartridges, record cleaners and phono stages – all “Made in Erlangen”, by the way – the Erlangen-based company also has 12 (!) tonearms in its range. We tested the seven most important ones. These are

• Clearaudio Profiler, around 1,900 euros
• Clearaudio Tracer, around 2,500 euros
• Clearaudio Unify 14 inch, from 2,700 euros
• Clearaudio TT 5, from 2,800 euros
• Clearaudio TT 3, around 4,100 euros
• Clearaudio Universal, from 5,500 euros
• Clearaudio Unity, from 15,000 euros

In the big overview article you will find everything you need to know about tonearms, additives and the overview, in this test everything revolves around the

Clearaudio TT 5

Are you a dentist? Or at least know a dental assistant? This could prove useful under two conditions. Firstly, you read this test and order the TT 5 presented here. Secondly, you have the ambition to adjust everything yourself.

Clearaudio is fully responsible for condition one. With the TT 5, they offer one of the most affordable tangential tonearms ever. Alongside three other sled runners in the range. Starting with the rather ultimate TT 1, which is part of the in-house “Statement” program and pretty much marks the upper limit of what is possible. To speak of the next smaller TT 2 and TT 3 as “more affordable” would be out of reverence for every honestly earned euro. There is no TT 4 out of reverence for Far Eastern customers. Because in Japan and China, they say, the number 4 is considered unlucky.

However, a tangential tonearm for less than 2,800 euros today (less than 2,000 euros when it was launched ten years ago) is quite something. The technical challenges involved in the theoretically correct measure of scanning a record in the same way it was cut during production are immense. In the cutting studio, the signal drives the stylus in a dead straight line from the edge of the record towards the center, i.e. on a radial line. Sometimes faster, when the dynamics and bass intensity require wide groove excursions, sometimes slower, when delicate flute tones purr. The spiral groove always rotates at the same speed, of course, and the cutting head is always at the same angle to it, so the stylus is always tangential to the record groove. The deviation of the tangential cut from the ideal line is therefore zero degrees.

With radial tonearms, however, the stylus itself describes a circular (cut-out) line above the disk. This circular section only intersects the ideal line at two points; and only at these two points is the needle positioned exactly above the groove as it was cut. All the other 666 times that the arc passes the imaginary radius on a 20-minute record side, it does so with a certain deviation from the ideal, this is called the tangential tracking error. Minimizing this distortion-prone error is a science in itself. Entire religious wars took place and hi-fi friendships broke up over the question of which template to use to optimize the angle for which records.

So why not avoid it altogether? Because the mechanical and manufacturing complexity makes a tangential tonearm expensive. The biggest problem is the smooth movement of the pickup from – usually – the outside to the inside. Hi-fi history is familiar with servomotors that forced the arm to move in a straight line across the record. Sometimes they tugged excessively on the sensitive stylus mechanism, sometimes they failed. There were air-cushioned arms where the noise of the bellows or their failure made any musical enjoyment absurd. And there were and are arms where the bearing friction of the carriage is kept so low that it is pulled by the tracking force of the groove alone. The Clearaudio TTs belong in this class.

The job is anything but trivial. After all, the carriage guides the short tonearm together with the pick-up system. This requires a certain amount of contact force and should also be able to cope with wavy or uneven records. In other words, a complex system of masses and accelerations needs to be mechanically controlled.

To get straight to the point: The TT 5 masters the job. Here, the carriage runs on dry ball bearings over a smoothly polished glass tube without any lubricant. The carbon stub arm is held in the two semicircles of a double screw clamp. At one end is the headshell for holding the pickup system, while the counterweight for adjusting the tracking force is slipped over the other.

Which brings us to the touches with dental medicine mentioned at the beginning, and more precisely to the second condition. Adjusting a pickup in the TT 5 requires an extremely steady hand, a certain amount of practice and a lot of patience. And just as the dentist or his assistant in the upper jaw sometimes have to work with mirrors and/or a highly sensitive sense of touch, the azimuth on the TT 5 needs to be optimized. In other words, the precise vertical position of the needle in the groove, which determines the accurate location and channel separation and does not correspond exactly to the vertical of the housing surface on every pickup. To do this, it is necessary to loosen the screws of the aforementioned clamp with a delicate Allen key in a confined space, blindly feeling your way or using a mirror, and above all – be careful not to over-tighten – to fix them again. Anyone who wants to attach one of the four enclosed steel cylinders to balance the support force with the locking screw pointing downwards is also challenged in this discipline. The author opted to turn the screw towards the ceiling. And to activate his own tonearm balance, as the TT 5 does not come with one.

After carefully adjusting the height of the arm, i.e. the Vertical Tracking Angle (VTA), it is also rather a small pleasure to tweak the tangentials with the help of the enclosed template. To do this, you need to loosen the same clamping screw in the aluminum clamping ring of the tonearm base that you had already fixed in the correct VTA. “Please make sure that the height of the tonearm is not adjusted” warns the otherwise exemplary adjustment instructions, while you curse and turn the tube horizontally micrometer by micrometer until the tracking error angle is zero over the entire record side distance.

All of this can be achieved, although not everything is as easy as the precise horizontal alignment of the arm thanks to the built-in spirit level. Nevertheless, the clumsy or impatient contemporary is referred to the dense Clearaudio dealer network, where precise assembly should be part of the delivery service. We also strongly recommend the purchase of the Swing Base for 570 euros, which will make some things easier, but will still put a strain on the budget.

All this is forgotten once the TT 5 is running properly, or rather, once the needle is running. The tester writes with a certain amount of restraint due to the adjustment effort: “But in terms of imaging stability, positioning precision and dynamic precision work, the tangential “entry-level” arm simply puts most radial tonearms in its price range in the shade. It also passed two special tests with flying colours: The Tacet record company has introduced a pressing method for certain productions that is basically logical, but rarely realized in practice: “Playing Backwards”. For example with Maurice Ravel’s classic hit “Bolero”, which is then called “oreloB” here and runs from the inside to the outside. It definitely makes sense, because the quiet beginning requires little groove space, while the racket at the end needs plenty of room, which the outer groove provides much more generously. By the way: How much the author and self-confessed Genesis fan wishes that the Genesis masterpiece “Foxtrot” with the long track “Supper’s Ready” would one day return cut like this…

However: the TT 5 mastered the “oreloB” masterfully. Not played backwards, of course, but forwards, but running from the inside out. The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra blossomed in all its glory. Great cinema.

Second special test: The author spent several years in Switzerland, where he got to know and like the dialect singer Gölä. He made his best record, unfortunately long out of print, in Nashville with US professional musicians who recorded a selection of his best rock ballads. The record was also available on a limited edition double LP. With one flaw: side C was pressed off-center. And that’s why super songs such as “We Du Jung Bisch” or “Uf U Dervo” “egg” on most of the turntables. With the TT 5 dancing back and forth, completely unimpressed, the whole thing sounds quite respectable.

Quintessence Clearaudio TT 5

No other arm conveys the fascination of the tangential on the one hand and shows its downsides as succinctly as the TT 5 on the other: its sound is superb, but its handling is severely limited. Perhaps it’s simply a question of price: its bigger (and 1,300 euro more expensive) brother, the TT 3, became the actual test winner of the 7-series comparison…

Pickup recommendation:

Clearaudio Maestro V2 Gold, around 1200 euros; 8.4 grams
Benz Micro Ace H, around 1000 euros; top recommendation for high-output MC, 8.8 grams

Clearaudio TT5	2025/06
GOOD – VERY GOOD

Total Sound Usability Workmanship

The rating always refers to the respective price category.

	Very well defined sound
	Precise spatial imaging
	Handling takes some getting used to
	Cartridge change not recommended for laymen

Distribution:
Clearaudio
Spardorferstraße 150
91054 Erlangen
www.clearaudio.de

Price (manufacturer’s recommendation)
Clearaudio TT5: 2.800 Euro

Technical data

Other tonearms in the test:

• Clearaudio Profiler, around 1,900 euros
• Clearaudio Tracer, around 2,500 euros
• Clearaudio Unify 14 inch, from 2,700 euros
• Clearaudio TT 3, around 4,100 euros
• Clearaudio Universal, from 5,500 euros
• Clearaudio Unity, from 15,000 euros

7 Clearaudio tonearms in comparison: the overview

More from Clearaudio:

Test Clearaudio Balance Reference Phono
Test Clearaudio Reference Jubilee: Super turntable with Boomerang chassis
Test turntable Clearaudio Concept Active + active speaker Elac Navis ARB-51
Test phono stage Clearaudio Basic V2