What We Offer

The basics for achieving accurate playback come from an understanding that what we had in the pre-’80s period were idler drive record players and this is what the music was made to play upon. These were a complication of automatic parts in the “Dansette-dominated” age that added a sound called mechanical feedback to all Vinyl playback and when accurately restored and updated will do so for as many years to come.

Modern machines utilise a rubber belt around the motor spindle to drive the platter silently, and this system was initially developed entirely for silent playback of live and generally classical or orchestral pieces in the late ’60s into the ’70s. Many of these machines were no compromise engineering masterclasses but critically belt drive became the go-to system because cheap production cost allowed new players to overhaul the market stealing a march on existing established quality idler drive manufacturers’ products. The idea is great, but the lion’s share of music was recorded and manipulated in a studio to take us to the place and feeling of live interaction and a constituent part of this is mechanical feedback. This is a quality only found within the drive systems of the machinery used for playback in period.

The belt drive system was developed in mind of the fact that the recording did not get processed through a sound desk. As a consequence, “ideal sound reproduction” was to only hear playback of the sounds in the room where the artists performed. For this, at its optimum, to have no mechanical sound inherent in playback was a great sales tool – billed as perfection in fact - and especially where the client might afford and be sold a very technical and highly prized best possible machine for playback.

We can and have learnt from these machines, but they have now failed to remain used for their specific design purpose - instead spawning the cheaply produced belt drive midi systems of the ’90s – these in turn became the awful plastic production which we see today, which while they may play a record they cannot in fact reproduce it.

Because recording studios were not big enough to house an orchestra, a live recording was entirely necessary. The belt system provided as-close-to-silent playback as possible and it was this system that was then developed further with scale to cost rather than quality, until this eventually gave way because it simply was not acceptable in every circumstance. Enter now the third type, the more robust direct drive or commonly referred to DJ decks of the ’80s. This is where a well-balanced motor operates directly upon the platter thereby removing the need for a belt to drive the platter at all.

Once again this has next to no mechanical feedback, what it did have was greater strength and durability where direct drive allowed the motor to be used to cue records easily which for broadcast worked well and also allowed a DJ to overlay beats and scratch which is an art form in itself.

Both these systems offer highly practical devices in their own right, but critically these do not regard studio sound reproduction as their first priority. This is what creates the X factor. An idler deck may have been less perfect in terms of playback of live recordings, but the margin is slim. By comparison the sound difference or deficiency when playing studio productions on a belt drive or direct drive is very marked indeed. This difference is rarely referred to as the industry has nothing idler drive to sell you. The 'new' remastered Vinyl recordings flooding the marketplace are not a correction of the artist’s work but instead are a recognition of the poor-quality playback associated with playing our original Vinyl on equipment designed with a different purpose in mind. Idler drive will in fact play both original and remastered or new Vinyl equally well, although remastered vinyl does not always regard the artist’s recording choices.

The key to quality reproduction is the way in which a machine may optimise playback. The signal is carried by vibrations picked up by the stylus and transferred via the tonearm to the amplifier. It is the preservation and quality of this signal that has the greatest effect on sound quality. The lighter and better the balance of the cartridge the better the preservation of the recording’s musical separation, the better the tonearm and critically the tonearm wiring the better preserved the signal will be when it gets to the amplifier.

Sadly, the sales rhetoric of modern turntables is limited to regard what is available to sell and thereby geared towards the silent perfection only created to optimise the finest live recordings. This fails to regard the reality that precious recordings of our favoured artists, a majority created before the digital age took hold, and a vast majority of the world’s Vinyl production just sound better on the machines they were made to play on. The mechanical feedback that was present is inherent rather than pervasive and forms an even more crucial component to the soundstage than a greater level of silence can for a live orchestral performance which technically demands a silent pallet which is rarely achieved in practice in any case.

Your sound choice must represent value for the sounds that you choose. You need not be concerned if your requirement is to optimise every type of music for every occasion as it is perfectly possible to run both drive systems through the same amplification and speakers enjoying each and every benefit as we demonstrate through our proprietary pre-amps at PlayVinyl London .