Stephen Mejias mention Garth Powell's passion for what he does in his
report from the Furman room at CES. AJ Conti, the man behind turntable manufacturer Basis Audio, has a similar passion for what he does. His current attention is focused on getting the drive belts for his well-regarded turntables as flat as possible, to eliminate the last vestige of drive-system spuriae from the audio recovered from vinyl. Dissatisfied with the highest precision he could get from commercial ground-belt vendors, he invested in his own production machinery.
The result is the Basis Revolution Belt, a seamless belt claimed to be flat along its circumference to within two ten-thousandths of an inch. To prove it, AJ brought his test rig to CES. The belt is rolled over precision bearings, with a lever giving 1x, 2x, or 5x mechanical advantage used to drive the precision deflection meter shown in my photo. Now
that is
flat.
Basis also introduced its Vector Model 4 tonearm at CES, but we got so heavily into a discussion of turntable drive systems and belts that I forgot to take notes. :-(
