The Turntable as Furniture
Analog Soundware Design Lab for audiophiles, collectors, audio designers and restorers
The first turntable I restored for money was a Thorens TD124 that had spent the better part of twenty years in a dentist's waiting room. He had bought it, he told me without a trace of embarrassment, because it went with the sideboard. The cream paint had yellowed to the colour of weak tea, the idler had a flat spot you could feel with a thumbnail, and someone had lubricated the main bearing with what I am still fairly sure was sewing-machine oil.
When I handed it back, he looked at the plinth before he looked at anything else. He asked whether I had touched up the paint. I had. He was delighted. He never asked about the bearing or the motor or the wiring.
I think about that man whenever someone asks what I make of the current run of coloured turntables. The Pro-Jects existing in a dozen of shades, the Regas in finishes I would never have predicted from that company when I started. The question usually arrives with an edge to it, as though the person asking already knows my answer and wants it confirmed. I do not think I can confirm it, at least not cleanly. Thirty years of looking at other people's decks have left me with a more complicated view, and some of it doesn't flatter people like me.
It was always furniture
The first thing worth saying is that the premise of the question, that turntables used to be tools and are now becoming objects, doesn't survive much contact with history.
The Braun SK4 that Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot put together in 1956 was a piece of design before it was anything else, and Braun sold it that way. Jacob Jensen's Beogram 4000 ended up in museum collections because of how it looks and moves, not because of its tangential tracking, clever as that was. The LP12 found its way into thousands of British living rooms partly on the strength of a wooden plinth that sat comfortably next to a teak sideboard. Garrard finished the 301 in hammertone and cream because the people buying them had rooms, and the rooms had colours.
Even the decks we now treat as pure engineering artifacts were styled. Somebody at Thorens chose that cream. Somebody drew the 124's strobe window and decided how it should glow.
What has changed is the proportion, and the order. In an older deck the styling usually sat on top of engineering decisions that were largely settled before the designer arrived. In some of what I see now, the colour range enters the conversation early, occasionally before the motor does. That is a narrower worry than "lifestyle is ruining the hobby".
What colour actually costs
From the bench side, paint is cheap. Whether a plinth leaves the booth black or sage green makes almost no difference to the bill of materials. The real cost of a colour range is complexity. That means more stock, more part numbers, more forecasting, more cartons of a shade that didn't sell sitting in a warehouse. For a small maker those costs are not trivial, and money spent managing them is money not spent somewhere else.
I want to be fair to the two names in the question, though, because they are not quite the same story. As far as I can tell from the units that pass through my work-studio, a Rega in a bright finish has the same arm, bearing and motor as the black one beside it. The colour is laid over the engineering, not traded against it. Pro-Ject offers an enormous spread of finishes and also builds machines that serious people use seriously. Neither company has stopped caring how a deck works.
My concern is less about any single product than about where the conversation with the buyer begins. When a product page leads with a colour picker, the reviews tend to follow, and the next design brief gets written partly from the reviews. I have done consulting work, for makers I won't name, where the first agenda item for a new model was finish options and speed stability came up forty minutes later. Nobody in that room was cynical. They were responding to what sold. That is how an engineering culture thins out. It is not because anyone decides it should, but through a slow reordering of which questions get asked first.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The one I got wrong
I would be on weaker ground here if I had not made the same mistake myself.
Some years ago, I built a deck to order for a client who wanted, above all, something beautiful. I gave him piano lacquer over an MDF core, more coats than I'd like to admit, each one flatted and rubbed out by hand. It was the best-looking thing I had ever made, and I was proud of it when it went out the door.
Eight months later he rang to say that cello sounded thick and a little slow on it, and that once he had noticed, he could not stop hearing it. I drove over expecting a cartridge setup problem. It was not. When I got the plinth back to the workshop and put an accelerometer on it, the finished shell had a clear resonance in the low midrange that the bare carcass had not shown in my early tests. I had committed to the finish first and then designed the damping around not disturbing it, which meant I had quietly left out the constrained-layer treatment I would normally have used.
I rebuilt it at my own expense. It took the best part of a month. The second version looked slightly less spectacular and sounded considerably better, and to my relief he preferred it.
What I took from that was not that appearance is the enemy. That deck deserved to be beautiful, and I still think so. The lesson was about sequence. I made the decision that should have come last before the decisions that should have come first, and everything downstream bent around it. When people tell me colour is ruining turntables, I think about that plinth. The hazard is the order of decisions, not the paint.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The theatre of engineering
If anything troubles me more than colour, it is something next door to it. Decks that are styled to look engineered. The turntable as furniture.
Clear acrylic platters. Exposed belts running around oversized pulleys. Polished counterweights the size of a fist on arms that don't need the mass. Visible springs on decks where the suspension does very little. These features photograph well and borrow the vocabulary of serious design, which is exactly what makes them harder to judge than a coat of orange paint. Nobody mistakes orange for engineering. Plenty of people mistake a thick acrylic platter for it.
The awkward part is that every one of those features can be a legitimate choice. Acrylic can be chosen for its mechanical match to vinyl. A decoupled motor and a long belt can earn their place. Mass at the counterweight can be right for a particular arm and cartridge. Two decks can carry the same component for entirely different reasons, and you cannot tell which from a photograph. You can only tell by asking what problem the feature solves, and whether the rest of the design is consistent with that answer.
So, the useful line, I have come to think, is not between plain and colourful, or between tool and lifestyle object. It is between features that are there because the design needed them and features that are there because the brochure did. That line runs through every price bracket, including the ones most of us reading this have bought into.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Who comes in through the coloured door
A few years ago, a woman in her twenties brought me an orange entry-level deck with a sticky arm lift. It was a five-minute job. She came back three years later with a TD160 she had found at an estate sale and wanted it done properly; bearing, suspension, arm board, the lot. She asked better questions than some of the people I have worked for.
I would like to tell you that happens all the time. It does not. Most people who buy a deck for how it looks in the room keep it, enjoy it, and never think about the bearing, much like my dentist. I am no longer sure that counts as a failure.
There is a second effect that matters to people in my line of work. A great many lifestyle decks sold in the last decade are already turning up second-hand, often with perished belts and arms that were never set up. Some are not worth the bench time. Many are, and they are reaching people who will open them up and learn something in the process.
The hobby as most of us know it was never a mass culture. It was always a small number of people taking machines apart, surrounded by a much larger number who simply played records. The coloured decks have made that outer ring bigger. Whether the inner circle grows with it depends less on the paint than on whether anyone is around to answer the questions when they come.
Where the engineering culture actually lives
That is where I would locate the real risk, if there is one. Engineering culture in this field has never lived in product catalogues. It lives in workshops, in a handful of small makers, in restorers, in long arguments about bearing oil viscosity between people who should probably be asleep. It survives for exactly as long as it has successors.
The designers of the next twenty years will start somewhere, and a good number of them will start with a deck chosen for its colour. If that machine teaches them that a turntable is something you pick from a batch, they may never ask what is under the platter. If it is honestly made, with a decent bearing and an arm that rewards careful setup, it may be the thing that sends them looking. I started on a Garrard in my father's radiogram, which was, let's be honest, a piece of furniture. It still got me here.
So, I would rather offer a few questions than a verdict. When you look at your own deck, which of its virtues would you defend on engineering grounds alone, and which are you quietly enjoying because they look good? When you last chose between two machines, what actually tipped it? And when we criticize a coloured plinth, are we sure we are defending a principle, and not just our own taste in burr walnut and hammertone?
Most of us have a 301 or a 124 somewhere in a plinth we spent more on than strictly necessary. I certainly do. That dentist kept his TD124 another fifteen years, played it most evenings, and loved how it looked in the room. I fixed the bearing because it needed fixing. He enjoyed the paint because he enjoyed it. I have stopped thinking one of us was missing the point.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The author has no commercial relationships with any company mentioned in this article. Views expressed are the author's own. Correspondence and disagreement are equally welcome.
Comments