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Review 2 of 2 Summary:
Not many people will get to hear this product and that is a great shame. I don't own this turntable and at £50,000 (in the UK) I never will. As far as I know only about 20 examples will be built, so I count my self lucky for having heard it. £50,000 is alot of money for a turntable, but this is one hell of a lot of turntable. It uses air suspension with active stabilisation control, similar to that used on some expensive sports cars. Just pressing the plinth down, which itself is huge and heavy, and watching it return is a sight to behold. The movement is slow and controlled unlike the fidgety motion of many decks using springs. It's easy to imagine that this suspension system wont let much noise through!
Elesewhere, the arm uses an air bearing and parallel tracking and the record is clamped to the heavy platter by a vacuum system. The outer edge of the record is supported by a rubber O-ring ensuring (if you press the record down carefully) that virtually any warp is ironed out. The platter also spins on an air bearing and is driven, not by a motor connected by a belt, but directly. This arrangement is said to eliminate the cogging effects associated with a.c. motors and also the uneven frictional forces in the bearing caused by the pull of the belt. In a conventional arrangement the belt is also a route for external vibrations to enter the replay system and this is also eliminated here. The speed of rotational of the platter is monitored by an optical system that (I assume) corrects any speed variations.
Ok, so you get the idea, this is one serious piece of kit with many features that few (if any) other turntables have. But what does it sound like? Well, I spent about 3 hours listening to this turntable (courtesy of Absolute Sounds) through amplifiers the make of which I don't recall that were driving Arca apeakers. The speakers are a hybrid electrostatic/moving coil with a very large bass unit. The first thing that was apparent when listening to this deck was the noise floor, or rather the complete lack of it. Playing virtually new pressings of 'audiophile' recordings there was CD like silence between tracks and the start of each piece of music was preempted by the sound of tape hiss. I can honestly say that I have never heard another turntable control background noise better than this one. The second thing that was apparent was the quality of the stereo image. It was holographic! The sound came from a nice spread of positions between the speakers and you could almost imagine the shape of individual instruments from the sound that was heard. Stage depth was also very good. Bass extension however, was nothing short of staggering, helped I am sure by the (approximately) 12" bass driver in the speakers. Dynamic range and dynamic contrasts were also remarkable. Loud sounds could develop very quickly with no apparent loss of quality. This, and the extremely well supressed background noise, I am sure are due to the second-to-none isolation afforded by the air suspension system.
The down side? Well, the deck was hyper revealing of lesser recordings, background noise was never a problem, but the contrast in the sound quality in terms of the sound stage and bandwidth between the specially recorded audiophile cuts and the regular stuff was huge. Also I would not describe this deck as exciting to listen to. Rhythmically I would say that it was not up there with the best, but unfortunately I didn't get the chance to try the deck out with some of my own recording that I know really boogie so I would have to leave absolute judgement on that matter. It's sound would best be described as clinical, with virtually no character or tonal inaccuracy. For some people this would certainly be the ultimate turntable, I was amazed in many respects, but know that I could live without it.
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