Spin Doctor

After a decade of holding the annual High End Society show in Munich, Germany, this year the society moved to a new city and country. The show decamped to Vienna, Austria. There was no shortage of new phono-related debuts at the show. Here are some that caught my eye.

Technics introduced the world's first direct-drive turntable, the SP-10 (above), in 1970. It was aimed squarely at professional facilities like radio stations and not at deejays for club use. The SP-10 was a "motor unit"—just a spinning platter with no plinth or tonearm, which the user was expected to source elsewhere.

Making a turntable's platter spin at exactly 33¹/₃ rotations per minute sounds like it should be an easy task, but in fact it's hard to do precisely. Just getting the platter to turn is easy enough, but there are two forces trying to stop the platter that you need to overcome: friction from the bearing that supports the platter, and friction from the stylus riding in the groove.