Hey guys, Adam Lobo here from Adam Lobo TV. And in this article, I will be showing you my 2021 Minimalist Audio Setup and share with you on the devices that I have used after finalising this turntable setup for a whole year.

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Shelving

Now firstly, if you have been following my channel and have seen my Desk Setup last year, you would have guessed that I went for a clean and white coloured themed. After thinking of what I wanted console or a shelf to go for, I went with the Ikea KALLAX Shelf.

While IKEA has lots of configuration for this shelf, firstly I went with the 8 shelves set up and instead of a matte finish, I went with a glossy finish as the matte-coloured ones tend to discolour after a while. And instead of leaving the compartments open, I went with another white glossy doors with silver knobs for each of the cabinets to give a cleaner look to the setup and to also store stuff like all of my vinyl.

Now besides having more shelves, one of the reasons which I went this longer length cabinet was also because I wanted to keep a good distance between the speakers and the turntable, to once again make the setup look clean and not cluttered in any way and also since I listen to music on a further distance away from the speakers, so this arrangement was perfect.

Audio Playing Device

Now on to the main audio playing device and out of all the turntables that I have seen, this particular one REALLY caught my attention as it was a vertical turntable, this is the Pro-Ject VTE Turntable, and I went with the matte white colour since there wasn’t a glossy version of it, as it also comes in matte Black and matte Red.

Other than the unique vertical playing style, this turntable can not only be placed on the table but also can be mounted on the wall if you wanted to. Installation was very simple as it pre-adjusted out of the box, so no further adjustment is needed. The only thing I had to assemble was the belt as it is a belt-driven deck and to play the vinyl on the turntable, first you will need to unscrew the record clamp, screw it back on after fitting the vinyl in and you are good to go.

What’s extra sweet is the fact that it comes with a great a directly soldered gold-plated RCA Phono Cable and also pre-installed with the Ortofon OM 5E cartridge with an 8.6” aluminium tonearm which overall sounded really good for my liking.

Then to give an overall boost to the audio quality, I have added in Pro-Ject’s own Phono Box E Pre-Amplifier, which for its price it delivers an amazing sound.

Now I am sure there are many higher quality turntables out there, but for me, I found this as my personal pick, from an aesthetic perspective and the overall audio quality as well.

Speaker & Sound Output

As for the sound projection and output, after testing out several bookshelf speakers throughout last year, I went with Edifier Airpulse 100. Firstly, these speakers are hands down the best-looking speakers that I have ever seen since Edifier’s release of the Lunar Eclipse speakers as these speakers were designed and personally crafted by Phil Jones, who is a renowned Audio Engineer. Other than this glossy white finish, it is also available in glossy red and gloss black and the speakers also comes with a tabletop stand inside of the box to reduce the overall vibration from the speakers.

Coming in with ribbon tweeters and 5-inch woofers, one of the reasons why I just fell in love with the speakers is it was such a great sounding speaker for any type of genre of music as most bookshelf speakers tend to be better on a certain type of music genres. And since I have a whole collection of rock and metal genre of music, the overall sound quality was the best that I have heard for its price with two parts of Class-D amplifier chipset from Texas Instrument.

Each cabinet is made from 18mm thick high-strength MDF with a piano lacquer finish. The interior is lined with a professional-grade sound absorption material to reduce unwanted colouration in your sound which some other speakers within this price tend to do.

Connection

Now while I have connected the Turntables via RCA but what’s cool is that the speakers have a plethora of input options like Optical, Coaxial, RCA, AUX, USB and even Bluetooth with aptX, which also means I can use these speakers to play music from my Bluetooth-enabled devices to playback Hi-Resolution audio and on top of that, the speaker has EQ adjustments at the back to easily and quickly fine-tune the overall music as well.

And speaking of fine-tuning the music, the speaker also has a subwoofer out to expand the overall system in the near future, if you want to. But personally, for me I found the current sound to be very balanced and again, sounding really nice.

Personal Touch

And finally, to add my own personalisation to the setup, I decided to keep things minimal by adding a Map of where was I raised, which is the small but amazing Kelana Jaya here in Selangor Malaysia, where the location of the map is exactly where I am at.

All right guys, so that’s my overall Minimalist Audio Setup for 2021 and beyond, hope you guys like it as much as I did!