Post by pinkie on May 10, 2015 12:38:44 GMT
A couple of years ago, after occasional chats on the phone over the years, I went down to see Arthur K again at his Newhaven factory, because he offered to rewire my Mission 774 arm. My creaking ageing HiFi had been dieing slowly - cantilever ripped out of Technics cartridge, Pip progressively failing due to frayed ribbon cables and noisy pot, and now the much-abused 774 losing a channel.
Like a kid in a toy shop I looked at the new Funk goodies and was astonished to see his turntables were now solid not suspended. I had always thought that he fundamentally believed suspended was the way to go for critical low-level detail retrieval. So why solid? Had he found out it was better after all? Was it the only way Vector would work? Did it make no difference?
"Not at all - of course suspended is better - but the market doesn't want it". We were back to bloody Colloms and AC motors? Not quite. But apparantly in todays digital convenience market, his distributors were telling him that bouncy turntables were too difficult to use - your average punter wasn't happy trying to cue a record on something wobbling like a jelly. And they cost a lot more than a solid - in a market which had shrunk radically and was dominated by Rega / Project. To be fair, I can remember the extreme trepidation with which I first used a suspended deck. It took a few months before I could get my heart rate down to normal before playing a record.
So - accusing him of being a prostitute, the long , slow, (unfinished) quest for a relaunch of Anniversary began(now , maybe incorporating K drive, vector, strata and other innovations). And in parallel, finally available (at present only for Vector and Saphire, but shortly for others, including most notably the SL1200
Kinetic - a suspension cradle for a solid turntable.
Still waiting for a proper picture (Munich show stress) - but this is from the Munich show flyer
The return of sanity!
Like a kid in a toy shop I looked at the new Funk goodies and was astonished to see his turntables were now solid not suspended. I had always thought that he fundamentally believed suspended was the way to go for critical low-level detail retrieval. So why solid? Had he found out it was better after all? Was it the only way Vector would work? Did it make no difference?
"Not at all - of course suspended is better - but the market doesn't want it". We were back to bloody Colloms and AC motors? Not quite. But apparantly in todays digital convenience market, his distributors were telling him that bouncy turntables were too difficult to use - your average punter wasn't happy trying to cue a record on something wobbling like a jelly. And they cost a lot more than a solid - in a market which had shrunk radically and was dominated by Rega / Project. To be fair, I can remember the extreme trepidation with which I first used a suspended deck. It took a few months before I could get my heart rate down to normal before playing a record.
So - accusing him of being a prostitute, the long , slow, (unfinished) quest for a relaunch of Anniversary began(now , maybe incorporating K drive, vector, strata and other innovations). And in parallel, finally available (at present only for Vector and Saphire, but shortly for others, including most notably the SL1200
Kinetic - a suspension cradle for a solid turntable.
Still waiting for a proper picture (Munich show stress) - but this is from the Munich show flyer
The return of sanity!
