Analog Corner

Are you old enough to remember when the wires connecting speakers to even the most expensive and sophisticated electronics were 16-gauge, multistrand lamp cord, and the terminals on speakers and amplifiers were just little screws? Sometimes those screws wouldn't even secure all of the wires' strands, but as long as loose strands from one screw didn't touch loose strands from the other, it was good enough . . . and back against the wall went your bookshelf speakers.

Dr. Feickert Analogue's top-of-the line turntable, the Firebird ($12,500), is a generously sized record player designed to easily accommodate two 12" tonearms. Its three brushless, three-phase DC motors, arranged around the platter in an equilateral triangle, are connected to a proprietary controller in a phase-locked loop (PLL); according to the Firebird's designer, Dr. Christian Feickert, a reference signal from just one of the motors drives all three—thus one motor is the master while the other two are slaves. (Man, today that is politically incorrect, however descriptively accurate.)

Cavitation revolutionized record cleaning more than a decade ago, when Reiner Gläss's Audiodesksysteme introduced its original fully automatic machine. Mr. Gläss's innovative machine, which automatically spun the record in ultrasonically cavitated water, then dried it with fans, at first was plagued with reliability issues, and because it is sealed, it was not easy to repair.

Other than for archiving and iPod use, is there any good reason to digitize vinyl playback? Pure Vinyl's Rob Robinson thinks so. His software offers RIAA and dozens of digital-domain equalization curves that he claims are inherently superior to any analog-domain filtering.

Peter Ledermann's head rose from his Neumann SX-74 cutting lathe. He looked concerned. "The platter stopped turning the other day and I'm not exactly sure why," he said. "It started working again, but you know, these things are old..."

The latest product from Graham Slee is the Reflex M ($1240). Like the company's previous designs, the lightweight Reflex M is housed in a small aluminum case and is powered by an outboard 24V DC power supply. RIAA equalization is applied actively within the negative feedback loop.

Will yet another $150,000 turntable fly in 2012? I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, but if any designer could make a turntable literally fly, it would be the Onedof's designer, Aleks Bakman.