The £150,000 Turntable June 5, 2007

READ MORE Entertainment , Hi-fi , Home Entertainment , Music

There is a loyal army of vinyl lovers out there but even the most ardent would be pushed to pay £150,000 for a turntable. OK, we recently had something on the Top 10 Most Expensive Speakers, but this really is a long, long way from my old, plastic vinyl spinner with the crackly sound and the carry-handle.

The Goldmund “Reference II” is billed as the world’s most expensive turntable and the company is only planning to build 25 of them, at a rate of just 5 per year.

It’s a beautiful piece of tooled metal, no doubt, but £150,000? Here are some of the specs which some folk will recognise as being worth paying a few extra quid for. Either way, they read like the features of an alien space craft.

Dynamically balanced 20kg platter with level and concentricity calibration to <1/100mm
5-layer platter design (3 metacrylate and 2 brass) with 12 lead damping inserts
Cog-free motor with lowest electrical and mechanical noise, shielded and dampened by 15kg of brass
Liquid-nitrogen-rectified belt, as the original Reference - Servo speed capture by optical encoder
Touch controls integrated in the tabletop for the turntable (33 / 45 / 78 rpm) and the T8 tone arm
Ultra-precise ball-circulation Linear carrier with zero-play and micron precision

That’s enough, my head hurts. Jump now for another lovely photo and the full specs, if you are that way inclined. -Martin Lynch

[Wired]