AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-LP120XUSB
Every time I see an Audio Technica turntable, I am reminded of disgraced West Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond. Well, not totally disgraced: He did, after all, on behalf of all Australians, manage to wrest the America’s Cup away from the USA in 1983, after they’d held it for 32 years!
More precisely, Audio Technica turntables remind me of Australian millionaire Kerry Packer’s quip about Alan Bond, which was “You only get one Allan Bond moment in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine.” This is because Packer was the beneficiary of a stunning business deal whereby, after selling the Channel 9 television network to Bond for $1.05 billion, Packer bought it back three years later for just $250 million.
Why I am reminded of this quip is because it’s very likely that the head honchos at Audio Technica say the same thing about Panasonic. Are you confused? Then you need to hear the back-story.
BEHIND THE DESIGN
Back in the 70s, Panasonic used to be simply a brand-name owned by Japanese multinational Matsushita Electric Industrial, an enormously large corporation that made everything from heavy machinery to power tools and everything in between. Panasonic was the brand-name it affixed on its small electrical appliances—clock radios, microwave ovens and so forth. But come the 60s, the introduction of the transistor made hi-fi components affordable to the mass public for the first time and so Matsushita entered the market with a new brand, Technics, which it used for all its consumer hi-fi products. One of the very first Technics-branded products to go on sale (in 1969) was the SP-10 turntable.
At the time, it was a technological marvel. Whereas almost all other turntables on the market used idler drives or belts to rotate the platter, Matsushita had developed a direct-drive motor that was an integral part of the platter. To do so, Matsushita (or more precisely, Shuichi Obata, one of the engineers at Matsushita) had to overcome a problem with electric motors of the time called ‘cogging’ where, when the rotor poles came into alignment with the stator teeth, the reluctance of the magnetic path was minimised and the rotor wanted to remain in this position rather than rotate any further. This meant additional torque was required to get it to move past this point, and the end result of adding it was uneven rotation, most especially at the low rotational speeds required when a direct-drive motor was used in a turntable. Cogging not only caused serious speed variations (i.e. wow and flutter), it also resulted in unwanted vibration and noise.
Matsushita’s direct-drive motor solved all these problems and so the SP-10 became the world’s first direct-drive turntable.
The Technics SP-10 was rather too expensive for most customers at the time so in 1971 Matsushita released the more-affordable Technics SL-1100 direct-drive turntable and then, in 1972, the Technics SL-1200 direct-drive turntable. This model was enormously successful for Matsushita (most particularly in its MkII incarnation, introduced in 1977), such that it and
