Industrial design, versatility, a great source of steam.

Will melt your records (unless you use it in a freezer), excessive noise (from steam valves) and size

AAAhhh, Lirpa! The name invokes visions of boiler rooms, steel mills and industrial disasters waiting to happen! As an early adopter of this amazing piece of audio gear, I too had problems with melted records until I got the cold fusion reactor. However, the reactor exploded destroying my house and everything in it! The only thing that survived were my wife, stepson, cats and the Lirpa Turbo Steamtable, a tribute to it's amazingly robust construction.
The incident naturally drove me to drink and drugs. While I was recovering at an addiction treatment center, I met the amazing Dr. Lirpa himself, recovering from his latest bout with heroin and alcohol addiction. As he lay in a drunken and drugged stupor, I yelled at him " I blew up my house trying to use that goddam thing! How am I going to play my records without melting them, you ugly piece of *$#%? In one of his few moments of lucidity, he sreamed at me "So build a freezer room, you $#*&@!# moron! Give me back my bottle of Jack Daniels NOW!"
A freezer room! Now why didn't I think of that before!? I escaped from the center in the middle of the night and went back to the ruins of my house and built a giant freezer room in it's place. Yep, Me and my family and cats have to wear winter clothes all the time (which gets me a lot of stares in sunny Florida) and all my money goes to Florida Power and Light but hey, that's a small price to pay to enjoy this amazing turntable and keep your records from melting. I'm also supplying steam to the local hospital's autoclave to help pay for the monthly $ 50,000.00 or so electric bill!
The moral of this story? If you're a candyass, buy a VPI, Basis or some other safe turntable. But if you are a REAL MAN, only the amazing Lirpa Turbo Steamtable will do!!! What, you wanna live forever?

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Various autoclaves, pressure cookers and other steam powered tools

these people are fooling around, many of the accessories and tweaks are just made up...why this happens to a great turntable just because it is unconventionally powered isindicative of narrow and vindictive minds at work. one warning do not use the steam recovery record cleaning mod, if the thermostat jams up it will melt your lp

opens the pores on your face

Can cause severe, disfiguring burns

What can I say that hasn't already been said. Very simply, if you love vinyl and don't mind an occasional severe disfiguring burn then this is the table for you. This table just dissappears behind a wall of steam and mechanical tumult. Sculding hot nuclear steam spews from a vast and impressive network of pipes and pressure release valves quickly filling the listening room. I still get an adrenaline rush when I turn the thing on. Oh, yes did I mention the music(that's what this hobby is all about) you can still hear the music!!! Even with the incredibly high noise floor. That's what it's all about folks. Beautiful, steam driven vinyl. If you're a long time fan of the sound of steam driven vinyl or have always wanted to try it but never new how to get started Lirpa is the way to go.

System

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Blast furnace

This device always gets the best reviews.

I cannot figure out what it actually does.

When I first got this thing, I saw the UPS man drop it out of his truck, and when I opened the carton, to my horror it was clearly broken. There were parts all over. The anti-matter containment field was no longer keeping the electrons aligned. The particle generator kept shooting out miniature images of Princess Leah. Worst of all the free Yoda action-figure came with the brown snake--everybody's Yoda has the brown snake. I wanted the black snake.

Well a quick call to Ubid got all of this straightened out. The president of Lirpa labs, a fellow who looked surprisingly like Bob Carver, came out to my house and before I new it, everything was up and running. He had to make a couple trips to radioshack, but all is well. I got 4 RS battery cards out of the deal too. Best of all, I think he's back on speaking terms with stereophile now as a result.

Well how does it work? In a word, hellaciously amazingly good. It's like my 8 track tapes have 16 tracks. Thank goodness I cleaned out K-mart's selection. I now have all of the KC and the Sunshine Band's hits--all one of them. Let me tell you that when KC hits the high notes, all the dogs in the neighborhood come running. This thing has such high WAF that my wife has asked me to mount it to the hood of her minivan. I am not sure if that's a good idea though, with the dogs chasing and such.

I must give this a resounding class Pi recommedation--somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. It's not quite a 4 because of the Yoda snake deal. Soon I hope to report on its compatability with the Tice power conditioner and Goldmund speaker cables. These products reportedly spin electrons only in the forward direction, so this could be a match made in heaven.

CSO

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WD-40, Spam, Cheez-Its, Schedule 80 90deg street elbows, Hoover Elite replacement bags, elbow grease, Oliver rotary planer, bugs, and dirt.

I recently came across one of these Lirpa Labs Turbo Steamtables at a cousin's wedding. The DJ (who also was doing the catering) had apparently built a stainless steel buffet warming table around the unit. So while he was spinning vinyl, he was also keeping the ziti and stuffed shells warm! The first thing I noticed was that the Lirpa Labs unit produced a less-than-neutral, delicately balanced (but slightly syrupy) flavor to the...wait, that was the veal. Seriously, I bought his table right then and there and I couldn't wait to get home and play some serious records. I was up all night, finding music in those grooves I hadn't heard in years! At dawn, I did notice a shift in the coloration once I switched over to french toast, sausage, and scrambled eggs. Things just sounded brighter when breakfast meats were being heated in the steam table, rather than heavier pastas. All around a great addition to any dining/listening room....4 stars for sound, 5 stars for keeping food warm, overall 4 stars!

RECALL NOTICE!!! Lirpa has recalled serial numbers LTS 10115 thru 10994 for improper suspension setup. During testing, the usual four jumbo green olives that support each corner (sixteen total) were installed with the pits left in. This produces a much harder and chewier jaw-breaking sound, rather than the quadra-olive(tm) hollow resonance effect desired. To compensate, Lirpa is offering all owners of these serial numbers a free pimento sound-core enhancement to the olive suspension. The resulting sound is much tastier and colorful. Remember to replace the quadra-olive suspension every 100 hours of playing (more often at higher elevations). 4-stars with the pimento enhancement (gustatorily and sonically recommended).

Makes a decent wok.

Takes at least 4 13 year old Phillipino kids to maintain.

I use one in each of my sweat-sh, uh, factories because I figure if they're going to listen to that crazy chicken music they might as well do Giffs shirts at the same time. In fact, I sent one to Howard Stern for his birthday.

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Cattle prod.

The unwavering support of the Lirpa community.

Hard to clean - small animals take refuge from the cold by the steam boilers. Deforestation of West Virginia necessary for extended periods of play. Seemingly continuous EPA inspections.

Recently I noticed that my Lirpa was beginning to sound a bit sluggish. Of course I suspected the Shropshire Newcomen coal-fired steam boiler. Could it be that the Romanian refugees I had purchased on eBay weren’t such a bargain after all?

A quick trip to the base of the turntable showed that the plucky Romanians were stoking industriously (much better than those Central American kids Kathy Lee Gifford pawned off on me – but that’s another review) and my mountain of coal was still as large as the Carpathians. So power wasn’t the problem. (I know I know, I should upgrade to cold fusion, but call me traditionalist – fusion just doesn’t have the warmth of fossil fuel, perhaps it’s the hole in the ozone.)

I was beginning to realize that this was not your typical bituminous bifurcation problem. I told the Romanians to take the night off, opened the release valves, donned my spelunking gear and lowered myself into the forward hatch of the tonearm.

Things appeared normal for the first 15 minutes of the descent, but I was not prepared for what I encountered just twelve maxwells past the Gaussian juncture. Although the previous owner had assured me that the factory had installed all of the Mk III modifications, the depleted uranium counterbalance was nowhere to be found! In its place was a jerry-rigged gallium/iridium-arsenide fixed-aspect field generator, obviously purloined from the ill-fated Lirpa One Series.

Aside from being devastated by the prevaricated representations made by the previous owner, I was now saddled with a seemingly insurmountable technological dilemma: How to dissemble the Gaussian juncture for counter-balance insertion without distorting the magnetic flux-capacitance inductors?

Fortunately, the answer was as close as the Lirpa Users Group (LUG) http://www.steamtable.org/users/lirpa/mkiii/mods/index.html

Alan Peterman, of Portland, Oregon had posted the obvious solution: De-couple the wave-resonance gimbals during the insertion process! Of course it seems obvious now, but at the time it really had me stumped. Thanks again, Alan!

Now it was simply a matter of machining the counterbalance to Mk III tolerances, which I was able to obtain from Kneel Yung Moon, who had a copy of the original factory blueprints! The insertion went without a hitch, and my Fluke measured ZERO inductor distortion!

The next morning, I powered up the table, which took a little longer than the customary 45 minutes, because the Romanians were still drunk from their night of freedom. The sound, however, was staggering. William Shatner’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” brought tears to my eyes again. All of the delicate nuances of Alan Sherman’s live performance of “Camp Grenada” were revealed once more. As David has noted in a previous review, the Lirpa positively bleets.

Yes, there are pitfalls, trials and tribulations involved with Lirpa ownership. But when one hears the subphonic regurgitations of John Cale, these difficulties pale in comparison with the aural pleasure Lirpa ownership affords.

System:

Lirpa Labs Turbo Steamtable – now with ALL Mk III mods, Romanian coal-stokers
(replaced the standard Nepalese coal-stoking Lirpa Sherpas)
Zeigler/Nixon Trutheller 2.b Amplifaxer
with Sirica/Jaworsky sub-poena module)
Universal Esperanto Speakers
Morrison Venezuelan Beaver-Fur Interconnects
Tripp/Goldman surge protector

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Popeil's Pocket Fisherman

Incredible Synergy with Krell KAV-300i and RadioShack Interconnects

shhhhhhhhh!! It's a secret!!

The Lirpa is the best turntable to show off the usually recalcitrant Krell KAV-300i integrated. The Krell chimerates, depending on the goatiness of the interconnects. With the Radio Shack Theatre Gold interconnects in other parts of the system, the Lirpa positively bleets. One has never heard better, except perhaps with Bose 901s or the famous Dynalab SDA 2.8 speakers.

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Technics SL-1200 MK III; Victrola Deluxe w/brass crank

Adapts to mouse fodder.

Smell

It has been known for some time that
the drive system of Turbo can be subject to flutter.

Mouse drive is the answer!

Mouse drive provides that tweak which smoothes the wheezes and gasps (which so many of us love) produced by the steamtable, without doing away with those sexy sound effects!

Mouse drive operates at an exact 33 1/3
mouse RPM. It produces no audable hum
or vibration.

The ferris wheel connects directly to the Lirba table via the usual belt.

And these little critters really perform! Round and round.

Low upkeep. Six months pettets supplied.
Low maintenance.
Three critters supplied, wheel, belt for
$l9.95. Thousand mile radius only.

Garage Stereo
Greenbelt, Ark. 30470

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Son's Erector Set.