Spin Doctor

Making a turntable's platter spin at exactly 33¹/₃ rotations per minute sounds like it should be an easy task, but in fact it's hard to do precisely. Just getting the platter to turn is easy enough, but there are two forces trying to stop the platter that you need to overcome: friction from the bearing that supports the platter, and friction from the stylus riding in the groove.

Technics introduced the world's first direct-drive turntable, the SP-10 (above), in 1970. It was aimed squarely at professional facilities like radio stations and not at deejays for club use. The SP-10 was a "motor unit"—just a spinning platter with no plinth or tonearm, which the user was expected to source elsewhere.

After a decade of holding the annual High End Society show in Munich, Germany, this year the society moved to a new city and country. The show decamped to Vienna, Austria. There was no shortage of new phono-related debuts at the show. Here are some that caught my eye.

A lot of us are vulnerable to marketing and hype, especially when we are young and impressionable. As a young kid, I was convinced that Sea Monkeys for a dollar from the back of a comic book would bring me a bowlful of happiness, until my Uncle Jim convinced me that not all was what it seemed.

I get nervous when I hear that an audio company I like is suddenly under new ownership. Are the new owners planning to carry forward the legacy of the company's founders, or will they try to move things in a different direction?

I was heading back home to New York in my old Mercedes diesel on a Sunday evening, having just attended the annual Capital Audiofest near Washington, DC. Riding shotgun was fellow Stereophile scribbler Ken Micallef, and as we puttered along the straight, featureless lower half of the New Jersey Turnpike, we started to reminisce about our audio show experiences.

Renowned British turntable manufacturer Rega once defined a turntable as a vibration-measuring machine; that definition became the title of a coffee table book tracing the company's history and design philosophy.