Döhmann Helix One MK2
Designing and building a turntable isn’t all that difficult. All that matters is in plain sight: Start with a base of wood, MDF, or acrylic; add some isolation “feet” for it to rest upon, and a spindle bearing such as any competent machine shop can fabricate, topped by a platter of acrylic or aluminum or suchlike. The motor can be an off-the-shelf AC synchronous type, fed directly by the electricity from a wall socket. Machining a correctly sized pulley and driving the platter with a belt requires minimal math skills to achieve the correct speeds. Build the motor into the base, or put it in an outboard pod—either way, you’re in business. Now, just bolt an arm to the base at the correct distance, set up a cartridge, and enjoy!
Of course, designing a good-sounding, high-performance turntable is considerably more difficult. Ditto-squared for a tonearm. Anyone who’s been lucky enough to audition dozens if not hundreds of turntables and arms, as I have, knows that despite the simplicity of the concept, they all sound different from each other for reasons not grounded in magic—though sometimes, as with loudspeakers, a just-right combination of ideas and compromises can produce magic.
There are authoritative low-mass designs, like the recently reviewed Rega P10, and many great-sounding high-mass ones. Yet there are “drummy,” awful-sounding low-mass concoctions and overdamped, high-mass sludgefest ones, too. And of course there are dozens if not hundreds of fanciful designs—gleaming masses of metal-plated jewelry, acrylic towers, and the like that serve more as eye candy than ear candy and have little to do with playing records properly—which, as expressed by Rega Research, is to be a “vibration measuring machine”: one that’s properly tuned to be neither underdamped nor overdamped and that spins consistently at the correct speed (although that, too, can be a trap if over-executed).
Designing and building an vibration measuring machine is difficult, but even when that’s been accomplished, building a second one and a third one and many more after that—all
