Love your new record collection, but can’t give up the convenience of wire-free listening sessions? A new turntable from Philips looks to offer the best of both worlds, letting you listen to your vinyl and stream them to wireless headphones and speakers, too.
The cherry on top? It also plays CDs, letting you indulge in the delights of physical media your gramps is always harking on about.
The Philips Fidelio FT1 makes use of a belt-drive design with two speed playback, squeezing in a front-mounted CD player with a pop-out tray loader into its body.
The combo unit makes use of a die-cast aluminium platter, and keeps things stable with a heavy-duty slip mat to tackle unwanted vibrations. A replaceable Audio Technica MM cartridge sits on the end of an aluminium tonearm, with the deck featuring an auto-stop function to keep from popping once your vinyl side reaches its end.
The CD mechanism sits separate from the vinyl belt drive internally to keep one from interfering with the other, keeping your records and CDs scratch free.
While the deck can be controlled with an accompanying app, there’s also a bunch of playback buttons onboard to cycle through sources and tweak volume, with a display across the front edge giving a read out of what you’re working with.
If you’re hooking up wired speakers, the Philips Fidelio FT1 has a built-in phono stage, with RCA stereo outputs to use with your amp or active speakers, while there’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack for personal listening sessions as well.
But of course you’ve got Bluetooth here too, in it’s 5.4 variety, so you can send you vinyl and CD playback to any wireless headphones of speakers around the house. Purists might balk ash compression this brings to the otherwise analogue presentation, but LC3 codec support should keep the detail lost to a minimum, and the convenience of Auracast multi-speaker chaining will be much appreciated.
A perfect pairing
If you’re looking for fresh speakers to pair with the Fidelio FT1, Philips is also introducing new FA3 wireless active speakers. The bookshelf-friendly set offers two 50W speakers, using 5-inch glass fibre mid and bass drivers, and a 1-inch titanium tweeter. Both have bi-amplification.
As with the deck, Bluetooth 5.4, LC3 and Auracast are in the FA3 speakers, but you’ve also got HDMI ARC connections for hooking up to a TV, USB-C, optical and RCA aux inputs. They’ll be as comfortable on an office desk as in your listening corner then.
Full UK pricing is yet to be revealed, but Euro pricing puts the vinyl deck at €299 (about £260), and the FA3 speakers at €399 (about £350) per pair. They’re also expected to be sold as a bundle. Keep an eye out for these in stores in the first quarter of 2026.
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