Brutalist Turntable

What Happens When the Shoebox Design Is Abandoned

Analog Soundware Design Lab for audiophiles, collectors, audio designers and restorers

An earlier Design Lab article on this site asked whether a turntable really has to look like a shoebox. The argument was that mass distribution, resonance control and bearing geometry genuinely do constrain the shape of a record player, but that a rectangle satisfies those constraints rather than being demanded by them, and that somewhere along the way a technical necessity quietly hardened into an aesthetic default. That article ended with a question rather than an answer, and it carried, near its close, a photograph captioned simply Analog Soundware Brutalist, which was allowed to pass without explanation.

This is that machine. And it is worth looking at slowly.

It carries no maker's badge. That absence suits it. Stripped of the usual apparatus of brand and provenance, the object has to argue for itself on the evidence of its own structure, which is precisely the sort of argument it appears to have been built for.

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The premise

The thinking behind it begins some distance from engineering. Music is one of the highest forms of art, and it follows reasonably enough that the equipment used to play it back from vinyl or tape might aspire to a comparable level of achievement. There is no shortage of technically outstanding analog audio equipment in the world. With some rare exceptions, most of it looks like industrial machinery rather than like an object anyone would choose to live with. The design principle that emerged from that observation is not original. If you cannot buy it, make it yourself.

The mission was a turntable that compromised on nothing in performance terms while projecting a visual appeal one would not tire of looking at every day. The reference points named during its conception were Michelangelo's David and Rodin's The Thinker, invoked not as claims of equivalence but as a statement of direction. That is an unusually exposed ambition for a piece of audio equipment, and it is fair to judge the result against it.

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The arm came first

The conventional route is to design a plinth and then find somewhere on it to mount an arm. This machine was designed the other way round, and almost everything about its shape follows from that inversion.

The Acoustical Systems AXIOM 12″ tonearm was selected as the "everything adjustable" choice. The AXIOM is unusual even among ultra-high-end arms. It is a 12-inch pivoted arm with double nano-gimbal bearings, full lateral balancing and an elaborate system allowing effective mass to be tuned to the cartridge. It also has a VTA tower plus cartridge-level SRA/VTA adjustment.

That last point is important, as the tonearm forms an unusually sophisticated cartridge/arm matching platform. It is not necessarily the best choice if you want "fit it and forget it." However, the Brutalist was not designed that way. The Brutalist was designed to be interacted with, not to be forgotten.

The Acoustical Systems AXIOM 12″ is a German-made, double nano‑gimbal, dynamically and laterally balanced tonearm designed for extreme adjustability and very low friction. It is offered with fixed headshell mounting and SME‑bayonet variants; some versions add azimuth/overhang adjustment at the SME adapter.

Bearing is full radial/axial cardan‑shaft double nano‑gimbal using custom German aerospace‑grade instrumental ball bearings, assembled in a clean‑air lab with preheated bearing housings for precise fit.

Mounting board, bearing houses, VTA tower, and fixed headshell mount are made from triple‑tempered German AP70XX dural aluminium and stress‑relieved V2A stainless steel. Mounting plate is hardened stainless steel and counterweight assembly is made from German HD18 tungsten.

Arm wand is constructed from unique composite of surface‑hardened titanium and carbon‑fiber pipes, blocked together and internally liquid‑damped over the full inner surface. Wiring is pure silver litz with soft Teflon insulation. Some other options available on request.

The Acoustical Systems AXIOM 12″ tonearm was chosen for its extreme adjustability, on‑the‑fly VTF, micrometer‑grade VTA, independent SRA, tunable mass, and customizable antiskating make it ideal for fine‑tuning exotic cartridges and heavy platters.

The platter is 320 mm in diameter with a mass of 8.6 kilograms, in a die-cast brass and aluminium composite. Driving a platter of that mass permits only one answer. The drive is direct, by brushless coreless DC motor, with wow and flutter of 0.015 per cent WRMS and a torque reserve of 0.4 N·m, sufficient for the motor to keep firm control of a heavy platter rather than merely coaxing it along. There are two speeds, 33⅓ and 45, and no third speed to dilute the intent.

Walking around it

Approach the Brutalist turntable from the front left, which is how it is most often photographed, and the first thing that registers is not the platter but the ground.

The machine stands on four heavy rectangular pillars of warm, dull bronze-brown metal, and they are not placed at the corners in the way that feet normally are. They sit where a building's pillars would sit, carrying load, while the great grey mass above them overhangs on every side. One pier at the left extends forward from the body of the machine as a short cross-shaped point, so that the structure steps out towards the viewer rather than presenting itself squarely. Beneath the overhang there is a continuous band of shadow. The effect is of a platform deliberately lifted clear of the surface it stands on. This is not an object resting on a shelf. It is an object occupying a site.

Above the pillars the mass divides in two, and that division is the strongest gesture in the design. There is a lower slab, broad and horizontal, which carries the platter, and a second, taller mass rising at the right which carries the arm. They are distinct sections. They meet at a hard step rather than blending into one another, and the eye reads them as two structures sharing a platform rather than as a single box with holes cut in it. The arm sits at the summit of its own tower, on a small, machined pad raised above the level of the record, with real physical distance between the arm's mass and the platter's mass. Very few turntables make that separation clear. This one makes it the point.

Then the surfaces, which is where the object becomes genuinely unusual.

Every major surface is slate, and the slate has been worked in two entirely opposed ways within the same piece of stone. The horizontal top faces and the sloping flanks are machined smooth and flat, holding light in long even planes, so that a chamfered polygonal well opens around the platter like a cut made by a very steady hand. The edges, though, are left riven. The front face of the lower slab, the outer flank of the arm tower, the leading face of the left wing, all split and  unfinished quarry faces, showing the fissures and the flaking layers exactly as the material came apart.

The contrast is the whole visual argument, and it is made without transition. One surface declares that a machine did this. The other declares that the stone did this. They meet along a single hard line, with no chamfer to soften the meeting and no apology offered for the difference.

Light behaves differently on each. The machined planes go pale and cool, close to graphite, holding one even tone across their width. The riven faces break into dozens of small dark facets and read almost black, with occasional bright chips where a crystal face catches. Move around the object and it appears to change weight depending on which surface is turned towards you. From the front it is monolithic and rather severe. From the side, with the machined flanks catching light and the overhang throwing shadow beneath, it becomes lighter, almost cantilevered, and considerably more elegant than a first glance suggests.

At the centre the platter is a black disc floating clear of the stone, and beneath it the mechanism is not concealed. A stack of machined metal elements sits between platter and plinth, turned rings and short columns, layered and countable, performing whatever work of bearing and isolation they exist to perform. Nothing is buried under veneer. This is the same principle that produced the exposed screws on a Royal Oak bezel, or the visible chassis of a Richard Mille watch, applied to the one part of a turntable that most designs are at pains to hide.

The colour palette runs to three shades and stops. Cold grey stone, warm brown metal, black platter and black record. There is no visible badge, no fascia, no display and no cluster of controls asserting itself across the top plate. The brightest object on the entire machine is the record, which is as it should be, and which is a discipline more expensive turntables routinely fail to observe.

Plinth prototyping

Why Brutalism, specifically

The choice of slate and iron, and iron rather than steel, more or less determined the stylistic outcome. Brutalism, whose name derives from béton brut, raw concrete, is the movement most thoroughly committed to material and structural expression without cosmetic mediation. Structure is shown. Material is shown as itself. Nothing is dressed to look like something else.

That is an unusually good philosophical fit for a turntable plinth, whose entire function is mass, rigidity and the honest management of energy. A plinth is already a Brutalist proposition in everything but appearance. It is a heavy, inert structure whose job is to do nothing beautifully. The only novelty here is a designer deciding to let it look like what it is.

The Brutalist style carries a difficult public reputation, associated in many minds with weathered concrete and municipal buildings nobody much loved, but the association is with a material and a climate rather than with the underlying idea, and slate is a considerably more sympathetic material than wet concrete. Slate has a long history in plinth construction on straightforward engineering grounds, and it happens to be a stone that rewards exactly the treatment applied here: dense and stable enough to machine to a flat plane, and fissile enough to split into faces no machine could produce.

The result is a machine in which the ornament and the engineering are not separable. Remove the riven faces and the visible bearing stack and the exposed piers and what remains is not a cleaner design. It is a different, less truthful one.

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What it settles, and what it does not

The Box Problem article argued that the sculptural material available to a turntable designer is mass distribution, damping and bearing geometry, in the way that a balance wheel and a mainspring are the sculptural material available to a watchmaker. It asked what might happen if more of the industry treated those elements as things to be composed rather than concealed.

This machine is one answer, and a fairly uncompromising one. It does not resolve the broader question, because there is no single answer to be had and the article was right to be suspicious of anyone offering one. A different designer starting from a different arm, a different drive principle and a different set of materials would arrive somewhere else entirely and so he should. What this object demonstrates is narrower but more useful. A turntable can be shaped by its own engineering priorities, taken seriously and left visible, and end up looking like nothing else in the room.

It also demonstrates that the alternative to the shoebox is not decoration. Nothing has been added to this machine to make it interesting. Things have been left uncovered.

Readers who have seen the machine, or who work in slate, cast iron, or other materials that resist the usual plinth-making habits, are invited to write in. The question of what a turntable should look like has been settled by default for several decades, and it is more interesting when it is not.

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The author has no commercial relationships with any manufacturer mentioned in this article. Views expressed are the author's own. Correspondence and disagreement are equally welcome.