OT: Ultra high-end audiophile turntables

Ones that cost tens of of thousands to over a hundred grand. AFAIK the Swiss made Goldmund is the most expensive at $300,000.
Goldmund's $300,000 Turntable is World's Most Expensive Turntable - Bornrich

The Gizmag article below talks about the new turntable from Walker audio which costs $45,000 . Their top of the line model is $110,000.
Walker Audio lowers price of entry for audiophile disc spinners


Now isn't this all just marketing hype? So if you want to play old records, any turntable is limited in its sound quality by the capability of the recording and production equipment of the time, so what's the point of these contemporary high-end turntables?

An just to some...

This new addition to the Walker Audio audiophile arsenal features a 4-inch aircraft-grade aluminum plinth that tips the scales at 45 lb (20 kg), a 4-inch thick, 30 lb (13.6 kg) thermoplastic platter that's balance-checked and relieved for lead-in groove and record label and a 3-inch solid brass spindle, with a ceramic ball to the bottom and zirconia ceramic bearings which are said to make for precise, trouble-free, stable performance.

Click to expand...

I know that more mass tends to produce better isolation from vibration and rigidity for machine tools but...how much is really going to make a difference for turntables??? It looks to me like these high-end turntable makers are just utilizing large chunks of material to get oohs and ahhs from rich buyers and audiophile critics. ElectroMessTechnik, which made top of the line commerical turntables in the 70s for stations, didn't resort to using these huge chunks of material.

Would be entertaining and educational if someone ran a test by playing back music to Audiophile critics and high-end buyers on consumer/prosumer grade turntables (Technics or that lazer turntable) but make it appear the music is coming from some of these high-end turntables and see how they react.

No clue about this stuff, as I'm pretty happy with refurbished $275 turntable, but I did work with a guy at my first job who sold a turntable he made for about $10k. Still nowhere near this stuff though.

Those high end turn tables are so funny. They're just status symbols for idiots. Or things to make people feel like they really know their shit.

I can totally hear the difference... But then again I'm an Audiophile.... So yeah... I'm kind of a big deal... Just so you know.

When you go from a normal turntable to high end turntable, provided you have good enough amplification equipment and good enough speakers and good enough environment, the difference is very significant. When you go from high end to very high end, there is still more difference, but the question on if it is significantly better is questionable. A trained ear can hear a difference. Now the difference between very high end and ultra high end is reported to be noticeable, but no one can reliably say what it is. I do seem to recall, hoverer, there being talk of doing a table made from solid granite floating on air bearings with a magnetically isolated drive flywheel. It does get ridiculous.

Rich folks bullshit.

And then you have watches:

#1 The Henry Graves "supercomplication," also by Patek Philippe, sold for $11 million at Sotheby's in December 1999. It's the most complicated watch ever created.

http://static5.businessinsider.com/...s-the-most-complicated-watch-ever-created.jpg

Paul

I think a lot of it is purely psychological. A $500.00 putter is going to make you a better golfer kind of thing. There is a marketing ploy that has been around for a long time. If some fashion item is not selling well then raising the price can actually make it sell better. It's kind of like saying "my kitty will not eat anything but little Friskies". If kitty gets hungry enough he will eat a friggin peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I have been caught up in this myself. If I want a really good tool I am probably going to buy the most expensive one there is thinking that it has to be the best because it cost more. May be true....may not be true. People often equate quality with price and in a lot of cases it's true but there is a limit. I like my old MP3 player just fine. My son doesn't because he is an audiophile and says a lot of the harmonics,overtones and nuances are lost. Whatever. I'm just trying to be entertained. After almost 70 years of banging on stuff I can't hear crap anyway up in the higher frequencies.

I'm not an audiophile that falls for gimmicks, but mass in a turntable is important if you're someone who plays their music load. I've heard some pretty terrible resonance and rumble using a lower-end turntable. Made me consider putting the turntable in a concrete doghouse. Then CD's came along. I'll probably catch heck from the analog-only crowd.

paul39 said:

Rich folks bullshit.

And then you have watches:

#1 The Henry Graves "supercomplication," also by Patek Philippe, sold for $11 million at Sotheby's in December 1999. It's the most complicated watch ever created.

http://static5.businessinsider.com/...s-the-most-complicated-watch-ever-created.jpg

Paul

Click to expand...

Yes, $11M is an amazing amount for sure, but that watch is truly a masterpiece of mechanical design.

Forestgnome said:

I'm not an audiophile that falls for gimmicks, but mass in a turntable is important if you're someone who plays their music load.

Click to expand...

did you really mean a music "load" - needs the mass to move those fred flinstone round stones with a bird beak needle ?

Now isn't this all just marketing hype?

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largely yes imo. EE's call them audiophools. i mean really, a lot of it is just too funny. It's more than marketing hype, its a con that makes the "Sting" look like petty street crime.

https://www.audiovisualonline.co.uk/product/8041/audioquest-diamond-rj-e-ethernet-cable-12m

Loud. It's still early for me.

It is so easy to get rumble below the combination of surface noise and amplifier hiss that all this focus on platter etc is bogus. Once they went PLL for speed[what, oh 1981?] then drive speed is more accurate than the lathe used to make the master.

You can convince me that tonearm technology can be important. weight and resonance, geometry.

The biggest difference is cartridge, that makes a huge sonic difference.

I have recently hooked up my old turntable, the kids love it, the great big records.

It is interesting after years of not listening to vinyl how good and bad it is. The flaws in the vinyl, pops, hiss, clicks, shocked the kids[what's that noise?] but the underlying quality of the sound was better than I remembered.

While theoretically vinyl can produce excellent sound, perhaps surpassing CD, it rarely does so in practice.

Put on your favorite piece of vinyl, put on headphones and turn it up to 11, set the needle into the lead in for the first track, and one half a revolution before it starts[assuming it starts loudly] you will hear the ghost of the music. Understand that is happening always. Listen to the whoosh of the diamond running across the surface, you get used to it and tune it out, but it is there.

If you insist on the superiority of analog, at least have the decency to use reel to reel, although those will suffer from print through I guess.

Vinyl was never the ultimate listening experience.

My only complaint with CD recording is that they stop at 20 hz, lots of bass below that

These have been discussed here already a year or two ago. The general consensus is those expensive record players* are for idiots.

*Note my use of the term 'record player' in lieu of 'turntable'. I use 'record player' as it is 100 times more descriptive and 100 times less snooty than 'turntable'. When I was a teenager there was a Denny's near me that had a corner table mounted to a single post. The screws that held the tabletop to the post were long gone. We'd go there and spin that table around like bastards. But it sure as hell wouldn't play any records.

Forestgnome said:

I'm not an audiophile that falls for gimmicks, but mass in a turntable is important if you're someone who plays their music load. I've heard some pretty terrible resonance and rumble using a lower-end turntable. Made me consider putting the turntable in a concrete doghouse. Then CD's came along. I'll probably catch heck from the analog-only crowd.

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Don't worry, now you too can experience audio nirvana by improving your CDs with this $600 CD lathe that will true and bevel your CDs and even allow you to easily darken the freshly trued edges for an all around improved listening experience. Audiodesksysteme Gläß - High End Produkte und feinmechanische Geräte

I spent a good deal of time in the audio business.

A HUGE part of the deal is psychology and hype. There ARE differences, but the difference between things at the top end of the scale are tiny, if they even exist.

I spoke once with a test equipment company rep. He had called on a maker of those $500 per foot speaker cables, thinking that he could show them how well the equipment could measure all the stuff the cable company bragged about for their cables.

Well, he did, and it did show the details. The folks at the cable company were very interested.... they said "That's pretty nice, we never measured that stuff, it's interesting to see what those numbers really are".

Turns out they ordered the cable in bulk from a well-known cable maker, with custom jacketing etc, but no real change to the construction.

Now the sales people were happy to work on their potential customers, cleverly suggesting that "if you don't hear the difference, then you are just not a customer for this level of equipment. Why don't you just go down to "XYZ stereo" and buy a Pioneer or panasonic system?"

That would get the wallet out in no time....

So much for the idea that it is all real.

Pick your saying - sucker born every minute, fool and his money...
Seems like we are all missing the boat on selling "high end" equipment for exorbitant $$$$$$$ regardless of whether it works or not. That last link on the cd lathe looks to target all those people who don't have a clue what digital technology means. Everything is a 1 or 0, you can either read it or not, you can't improve on the quality of the 1 or 0.....
Paul

Whoever can afford to pay those prices for a turntable, is likely an older person with much reduced hearing range. Presbycusis starts at quite an early age, and unless you become a millionaire as a teenager, the benefits of high fidelity audio equipment decline fast. At my age a $49.99 turntable from Amazon would sound just fine .

The only real hi-fi I ever owned I bought by wandering around stereo stores until I found the one I liked best, and I bought that. Over the next 15 years I never found anything that sounded any better. But I hardly ever listened and needed the space, so I got rid of it. It was about $20K all up in 1994. Definitely in the real high end class, but nowhere the Ultra Rich Stupid Class.

Of course too, some of these things are bought as "works of art" - like paintings or sculptures - and so "performance" isn't so big a deal. (Does Paul Gaugin's "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" really *outperform* Vincent van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet"????)

I guess you guys have never heard the Trump Turntable. It's absolutely the greatest, with the highest wow factor and the most rumble -- all to set your system a flutter. Everything else is junk.

Folks buy stuff for emotional reasons as much as rational ones.

Perhaps, and I say PERHAPS, there is some difference, hopefully an improvement. But I do not trust any "tests" that are not DOUBLE BLIND. Although I have worked in a professional TV enviornment, I have never been able to properly do such tests. The best I managed was a single blind test with different amplifiers and speakers with a group of professionals doing the listening and judging. They did not know which equipment they were listening to, but I did. The results were inconclusive in that one would choose one system and another would choose another. I was not able to completely control the circumstances so they were in a group and interacted with each other. Their comments clearly influenced others to change their minds. But even in the end, after several of them changed their minds, there was no clear consensus but a small bias (about 60/40) toward the least expensive set-up.

When the equipment was revealed to them, then they quickly rallied around the most expensive set-up and then refused to change back, even when reminded that they previously had another choice. And, of course, they all had excellent explanations why they changed their minds.

And this was only a single blind test. Only the subjects did not know what they were listening to. A proper test would be double blind and have the evaluator also in the dark as to what was being tested. He would only reach the results about equipment labeled A, B, C, etc. Only when the test was complete and the results reached and recorded, would the identities of those labels be made known.

I DO NOT TRUST ANY DIFFERENCES THAT ANYBODY CLAIMS TO HEAR IF THE TEST IS NOT A PROPER, DOUBLE BLIND ONE. That most definitely and particularly includes that group of perhaps 100 people who can truly hear the differences as they are the ones most likely to be influenced. When the person making the judgment knows what he or she is listening to, the results WILL be influenced by that knowledge. Not "may" but "WILL" be influenced.

As for my opinion, I believe that any improvements beyond the level of several thousand dollars will never truly be heard by anyone but a very, very few individuals, perhaps less than 100 of all presently alive. Many, MANY more will be convinced that they hear the differences, but not in a true, double blind test. Frankly I would never buy any turntable over $200 or $300 for any application from personal to professional as anything beyond that would be wasted.

I have a turntable that I purchased about 50 years ago for under $100 and it works well. It had an AC hum problem but that was solved with better wiring and grounds. I use it to transfer my LP collection to digital and the results are as good as I can ever hope to hear with my 71 year old ears. Certainly as good as the digital audio that my computer is capable of creating from it and recording. The turntable is certainly not the limiting factor in the quality of my audio. Surface noise, scratches, dust, etc. far override it. I have spent hours taking the scratches out of the digital transcriptions.

Yea, it really is subjective, and what most people don't realize, is that it is not even consistent to the same person on the same day. Smoking a cigarette, having a drink, or eating lunch will change the way you perceive the same sound. The really best sound engineers know this and learn pretty quickly to let the smaller details slide, because it's just not possible to keep things perfect. I remember a trick from one of the best sound engineers I worked with; once everything was set up, whenever one of the musicians asked for 'just a little more' in the monitor, he would just pretend to do it, and the musician was happy every damn time.