Hello everyone! We love the video and are delighted by all the nice comments here! We are indeed a small team of three from Germany and getting such a huge amount of positive feedback feels incredible! We already fixed the issues with the speed being too fast and are working on maintaining a higher quality control so stuff like the reversed cables does not happen in the future.
Thanks for getting in touch. Just so everyone else knows - my player is being shipped back to Coturn for a repair. I'll be looking forward to getting it back.
I am really impressed with the product overall. It looks great and is a cool functional design. I have a sony linear track turntable but I would consider buying one of these for more casual listening in other rooms. Keep it up.
When I saw the easily replacable li-ion cells I almost cried. This is the rarest thing in the world, a device that is designed in such a way that it allows the user to do easy repairs.
I'm amazed too I don't know ho many times that I've seen a product, even from people who are conscious about ewaste and repairability decide to put in a custom lipo pouch even when something like an 18650 would fit just fine. Going into the video I fully expected that to be the case for this.
Definitely will happen on large scale. On small production runs this might make things easier to handle but on large scale that is an expensive battery mount.
Mat, this has happened to me so many times, "Just need to make this slight adjustment..." and 10 minutes later the fire department's in front of the house.
@@geoffallan3804 Ah, that familiar 'crack' as the bolt-head parts company with the rest of the bolt and the remainder of your weekend instantly evaporates...
@@geoffallan3804 I build guitars and the same thing happens. A perfectly finished guitar, adjusting the final setup, one slip, scratch the finish, 3 days or more to sand and respray. Pain.
@@fanbladeinstruments I had to replace 2 water lines on my bathroom, unscrew 2 flex pipes by hand, get new one, teflon tape, screw the new ones back again by hand. Easy right? Teflon taping flex pipes is actually an Art that took me 1 week to master. I legit almost plastic welded in place because of how mad i was... Next time i will pay for someone to do it.
Would like to see an update for how they handle your unit's issues. How a company treats their customers is equally as important to me as how good their product is
The only issue in this case might be that he gets some special treatment. Not saying thats the case, but you cant be sure anymore now that the video is public and they definitely know its him..
It's interesting you said that, I was _just_ thinking the same thing. (I'm presently in the middle of a multi week fiasco to return a pair of DOA headphones to a smallish company) 😅
Inside the case it looks actually fairly nice in terms of repariability. Removeable RPi, so that SD Card can be scraped. 18650s that can be repaced if they are EOL. Nice.
@@Android-ng1wn I can only agree with the Pi Zero in there. The batteries? No thanks, keep 'em socketed as should absolutely every battery ever. 4 screws to get them out is definitely not a huge hassle, and helps with recycling to boot.
*Techmoan:* I like how you demonstrated the product, reviewed it, and came just short of actively selling it. In other words, you did what an informal reviewer is supposed to do: show us the product as if we were the one trying it out, putting it through its paces, describing the pros and cons, and finally offering up what you think of it. It's a simple formula, but you do it so well, and viewers like me trust you and the points you make. The passion for it, and the enjoyment you get out of it shines through. Thank you!
I have been a subscriber of Techmoan for such a long time now. I can't even remember when I subscribed. But honestly... his delivery is why I always kept him on the list, where so many other have been "let go". You are right :D. But he always does it well. In fact, he even makes me interested about things I have no interest in. Wish I had more teachers like him. 🤣 EDIT: In fact, I have even had people say "I don't like techmoan" and to which I have said "Yeah well... I don't give af". rofl.
@@MrJC1 Well, everyone is different in their likes and dislikes. For example, I'm not into sports, but I'm not against it either. So if someone is not "into" the Techmoan style and format, I won't push them. But I might encourage them to at least check out a few videos just in case. 🤔
I know I'm late but to me techmoan's integrity is boosted because he is open about when he receives devices for free and does not take sponsors. I know it's a position many RU-vidrs are not able to reject but not being sponsored to me makes a creator more credible
While I definitely haven't been in those meetings either, I have worked for years as a product designer with many big electronic brands under my belt, and it really comes down to one simple thing in the vast amount of cases, the economy of scale. Yes, there are record enthusiasts out there, plenty of them, but compared to the market which listens to digital audio, who streams or even who still listen to CDs the market is infinitesimal. Sony et al could design and make a new good turntable, but the amount of money spent on R&D on that, as well as the design and marketing, would eat up a large chunk of the profits such a device would bring in. For the same amount of money they could develop a new digital audio player and sell it to a much broader audience and make a lot more money. Coturn is doing something great, and may be enough to sustain a small company if they keep bringing out good product, but it would be a tiny drop in the ocean compared to Sony's profits even so. So yeah, spreadsheets and profit margins, it's what it's about.
Especially with a large company like Sony or whoever, a lot of time that profit lost by the R&D doesn't even mean that it didn't make them money, it just means didn't make as much as they would have liked. A smaller company wouldn't exactly be thrilled with it not doing as well as they would have liked, but their expectations are lower and moving the kind of units that a major company would move would be the dream. Selling 5,000 units means something very different to Coturn than it does to Sony.
Unfortunately I have to agree so many great products and ideas have gone away over money sad really what could have been also now a days people choice convenience over quality
I was about to comment something along the lines of "market to the lowest common denominator" but you said it much better than I could. Same goes for a lot of niche hobbyist/enthusiast products. While there definitely is demand and people willing to pay a lot, big companies make more by selling to the masses.
I'm personally a little disappointment with the lack of tangible controls for touch controls instead. I personally would have liked to see a knob and some push toggle buttons for the controls instead. They wouldn't remove from the design at all. I sure hope the confirmation beep doesn't sound when you've got a record playing.
Love the internals modular design the fact the battery's can be changed no fuss is a joy, also looks like there's a firmware update port next to the pi0 so maybe they will send you a new cable and a update file for the speed?
But why does it have to be battery powered ? Just to omit a power lead ? Im pretty sure that the sound quality would be greatly improved with a 12 v transformer . The batterys are two 1620:s in series and give about 5 volts, thats a recepie for Low Fi sound. The elephant in the room however was the very audible wow and flutter , I heard it long before Matt measured it. Crap ! This thing had ONE job to do, and it failed on TWO
@@tarstarkusz Seems only you and me noticed the muffled sound. What's up with that? I hope there's an explanation which doesn't involve the device. Actually, now I listen again, I don't think the cherry record sounded so muffled, so perhaps it's a problem with the blue record. EDIT: But I was quite sure the first time. I'm confused. *sigh*
@@Funkywallot I don't like the sound quality either, but I will say power voltages these days can be converted in ways which make the battery voltage irrelevant. A small example is LED lights driven by a single 1.5V battery when LEDs require nearly 2V to light up at all. In modern computers, power voltages are converted wherever they're needed on the various boards.
Nice to see a “nostalgic” product that isn’t utter crap. Have to commend them for using standard battery cells and making it easy to open. They should fix the speed, stereo and use thicker wires for the cartridge, but none of these are structural issues with the design. Hopefully, they will take them seriously.
Quality control is very important in a product like this, it would not take too long to verify that the wires to the cartridge are hooked up properly. Very unfortunate that the one they've cocked up gets sent to a big tech youtuber.
It may be that the assembly instructions are backwards and they've cocked up all of them. It's like a movie where they don't know to cut the blue wire or the red one.
@@RCAvhstape if i was an owner in this company i'd want to personally inspect the first models going out the door. Either way they need to fix that wiring harness to the cartridge, imagine having to swap that thing.
The AT-3600L is a wonderful cartridge and a great building block for a turntable design. What I'd love to see is a truly robust suitcase style portable. All the ones I have seen so far are quite cheap and flimsy. I'd pay good money for something with some real quality. :)
I actually just decided to take the suitcase Player into my own hands. Got a Crosley from the thrift store for $15 and I’m in the process of tearing everything out and building it back up with all decent quality parts. Sure, it’ll cost me an arm and a leg but I figure it’d be worth it just to have a decent portable
I have an old Magnavox that I love, and it needs some restoration work that I'm going to be scanning through Techmoan's older videos for advice on. Mostly it just needs some contact cleaning, and possibly new speakers. It weighs as much as a wet St. Bernard but I've taken it out of the house for special occasions.
Interesting to see a raspi zero-w in it. Could be for the WiFi Streaming feature. For me, it underlines the small series or prototype character of the product. Apart from that, very nice video as always. I'm happy to see a kickstarter project finally working and delivering.
Yes it will be for the Wi-Fi and quite possibly Bluetooth as well. as mentioned during the preamble at the start the wireless modules were a bottleneck and this seems to have been how they solved it on this initial run. I suspect that when it goes full-production they’ll find a more cost effective and permanent solution to the problem.
Nope. Not prototype nor even small series but good de-risking practice. Their business is turntables, not CPU sub-system design. The cost in bulk of a CPU module like the Zero is so low a designer is much better off just buying it off the shelf and adding the extension connector on the main board than trying to duplicate/"optimize" the module on said main board. There is no development time and cost, immediate availability, software and hardware support and full regulatory compliance off the bat. You get none of those things when you try to brew your own, something one should not try unless at least in the 100k units / $10M+ aggregated COGS range.
I never thought I'd see the day when someone opened up a turntable and found a raspberry pi inside. Of course, that only suggests that there's all kinds of motor-controllers and tech available to make turntables more accurate and enjoyable. Despite the problems of this product, they seem to have made everything very repairable. It's almost modular with several things that can be replaced.
It's quite an elegant design and obviously well built. Also it was excellent attention to detail in the layout. And honestly? I hope they succede. With that said though, I'd like to point out what others have said about it. As a Raspberry PI user, I have to agree that they can be a bit dodgy and can become corrupted after a period of time. I've had several of the Ras PI 4B I've had to return due to SD card issues (that is how Ras Pi's are programmed) so an alternative would be a micro SSD soldered in and the PI enclosed with a small cover. It can be OTA firmware updated and eliminates the hassles from a card slot. As for the wires, they are actually adequate for the device as they don't assume you are going to change the cartridge. This particular AT cart seems well suited size wise to keep the clean lines of the tonearm. But I agree the cart being on the high end of the tracking force could be a problem especially for older plastic formulations for records. A lighter cartridge perhaps? Or a possible place in the back of the tonearm for counterweight? Other than that, the price seems high. I understand it's niche, it's a high quality product, but the price does seem a bit steep, especially since this would make a fantastic micro stereo setup! Maybe an entry level version with plastic and maybe no Bluetooth or wifi (just basic RCA jacks) like the old ones could invite a wider audience?
@@deathstrike i got mine today, took a while, they even added some indie record and a Letter to apologize, and it is really nice and well put together. It's a bit of a Revision compared to the one in the Video and so far i really like it
Impressed by the quality. Looks the part inside too. Raspberry PI and replaceable 18650 batteries are a plus! The main board and system looks great. A bit more on the quality assurance checks before shipping and I would be happy.
That's a really nice little design. As for the problems, everybody makes mistakes. The question is whether they'll fix the problems or ignore them. I'm betting they'll make the effort to fix them, given all the other effort they've gone through. Time will tell. Thank you for reviewing.
That's actually a very attractive product. I'd love to see how the quality control turns out going forward because they clearly put a lot of effort into building it.
15:30 RPi zero! Wow! /cut to the muppet scene "You can do that with the Raspberry Pi!" But I agree with the comment above, it might have to do with the music streaming thing since Pi can do both WiFi and Bluetooth.
I think it does have something like quartz lock, observe the holes around the under platter, with what looks like some kind of LED(as best I can make out from the video) shining through them, presumably onto a photocell under the platter. So I think it has some kind of speed regulation, or was planned to, but ended up not being put in the software, or was simply not implemented well.
Oh, so that's what quartz lock is. Whatever the name, it's a servo system. Servo systems are notoriously hard to get right, but experience helps. I'm sure they'll be able to fix it with a firmware update.
I think you are onto something with this. I also noticed the holes. I can see how an implementation might try to do counts and timing to assess the speed of the turntable, and if you do the math, you get what might be an interesting result. It turns out that the ratio of 33 1/3 RPM to 45 RPM is 20:27 - this means that if you count the time across 20 hole intervals at the slow speed and 27 hole intervals at the high speed, it should give the same timing. Now - an LED through holes is not going to give you a really perfectly crisp edge detection, so there will be some error there. But more interesting is noting that if you goof on this and specify 20 hole intervals and **28** hole intervals, you will get a good 33 1/3, but the 45 PM will be ... about 3.7% fast. And a common error in this territory is the fence post error. A fence of length "20" has 21 posts, because it has one at each end. This is a category of off by one error that catches programmers all the time. I have no idea how this was actually implemented, but using a separate counter and time sub-circuit for motor speed feedback would be far more accurate than depending on software timing the Raspberry Pi. But a combo - where the Pi loads an expected count and millisecond time into the dedicated feedback hardware might give this result, and would, fortunately, be amenable to a firmware fix.
At 16:27 you can see a little Photodiode (? D1?) rightsided from the Motor, placed near the turntable. And in the turntable you can see little holes. Therefore it seems that this ist the speedcontrol by a photoelectric barrier. So i think, the issus with the speed are a software problem.
The late 70s and the 80s had a plethora of innovative turntable designs. I just recently refurbished an RCA Dimensia turntable MTT-135 for my son I bought in the early 80s. This had a CD-like drawer for inserting the records. It was a linear tracking tonearm with photo-electric sensors which could identify tracks. You could select tracks and it had repeat capability. What awed me was the exquisite minimalist design. This was not cheaply built but every part had a specific purpose and did it well without a bell or whistle. The repair consisted of replacing the drive belt, lubricating all of the slides, and replacing the needle. The hardest part was figuring out the correct approach for assembling the case so the door mechanism worked correctly. Once I figured it out (you had to place back it so you could slide it forward to mate) it all made sense. It functions like new again and I expect it to work for many years to come. I'm sure you know but the Dimensia system was a forerunner of smart systems. The remote brain was in the remote control rather than a component and there was a communication cable (standard rca type) between components to send the commands. When you turned on a device like the TV or Turntable, etc. the integrated amp would automatically turn on and select the appropriate input. When the TV, etc. was turned off it would turn the amp off as well.
A lovely looking and aesthetically pleasing turntable, and I am glad to see that it is fitted with a decent cartridge compared to other cheap turntables. A shame that the tag wires were wired up incorrectly at the factory and even more disappointing the wow & flutter which I could hear even before you connected it to the meter. Saying that, if these issues were rectified it has the potential to be a fantastic piece of kit. It feels like it’s 95% there already.
The slow release of the tone arm is like a record player equivalent of a slow-opening cassette player: a promise of quality engineering (not always fulfilled, of course). Back in the day, if the cassette door popped open quickly we know-nothing snobs immediately turned up our noses and moved on lol.
Most often the soft eject was achieved simply by molding a gear sector onto the door, meshing it to another gear with a large diameter shaft in a hole, then slathering it all with really sticky silicone grease.
@@greggv8 yes, but if they bother to make that they probably bothered to make some half decent cassette deck itself too. The cheap decks didn't really have soft eject
Ideally in the 80s, the cassette door would take so long to open that you'd have forgotten what you were going to play by the time it opened. That's how you knew is wasn't an Amstrad.
This is a thing of beauty. I think most turntables built in the 20th century all reflected the aesthetic of their time, but most nowadays are just purposefully nostalgic throwbacks, design-wise. This thing takes the sleek modern look prevalent in many of our other electronics, and has made a unique, high-quality item. Super awesome.
Very nice product, Mat. I love the pop-out mechanism for the tone arm. I hope you can do a follow-up video about this when it's fixed and show that mechanism in more detail too 😃👍
Yes, there are not many products that make me go "wow!" these days, but when I saw the way the tone arm popped up, it was a pleasant surprise. Wonderful little design, this is. It would be cool if their next version stood upright like the Sony.
The first time I saw anything even remotely like this was when some European collectors visited the record store that I worked at, in the early 1990s. From my own experience, here in the US, the emphasis on the "portable" turntable stopped by 1977. This is a very welcome video indeed. Nice to see that the concept is still alive and well. My sentiments on the "tech" are right with you.
I lead a simple life... Matt gets a new toy, makes one of his usual high quality videos on said toy, RU-vid tells me there's a new video on the Techmoan channel, and I watch and enjoy the video. Simple.
... only to never go and actually buy the product itself. (Just kidding, I still have the LG Minibeamer back in my hometown that I enjoyed for ages and bought after learning about it from Techmoan)
Got my coturn ct-01 green. 33rpm 0.77% fast 33,59 wowflutter 0.35 45rpm 0.73%fast 45,33 wowflutter 0.54 Seems to be improved😊 , im quite happy with the sound quality.
Wow, that is a beautiful piece of kit. I say at that price it’s a bargain. Beautifully presented too (putting on my graphic designer hat, the packaging and instruction leaflet design is very well executed), and the operational design is very well thought out too. Seriously impressive. I hope they can fix the speed issue with a firmware update.
Very elegant design and nice feature set. Pretty retro futuristic. Speed issues are something that should be adjustable in software, so maybe they can issue an update for it or something. Or some calibration software. Should be fixable. Looks very promising 👍🏻
It’s so funny coming back to this video where everyone was saying there was no demand for a product for this before AT made the limited run of the Sound Burger and sold out all 7000 units in an hour and released it unlimited today.
I haven't even watched it yet but I just wanna say sir I really enjoy your videos. I watch every one when it first comes out and I look forward to what you do in the future. Not to sound young because I ain't but as my daughter says " Your personality is a "mood"." And Mat sir I really enjoy it!
Man I REALLY love the design and finish of this turn table, although for my money with how expensive it is, I would've rather they forgot about adding bluetooth/wifi with an ADC and just maintain a volume controllable lineout and pre-amp out, as many bluetooth speakers have line inputs anyways. For that money saved to be put into maintaining wow/flutter and a more accessible/interchangeable cartridge design with the optional addition of bluetooth etc. would've made this one of my dream turntables, although the novelty of a portable turntable let alone one that looks as elegant as this is right up my alley.
Wouldn't it be great if the wifi capabilities would lead to a web interface on the Raspberry where you could adjust the speed settings (or stop time etc.)? 🤔
The USBs on RPi are both of the micro type, not C. Neither are actually connected to the rest of the system anyway though. So I suppose any software servicing on the Pi would have to go through wifi, or by taking the SD card out. And while it indeed seems to be the W model, I still wonder if the wifi is really handled by it. ? Being jammed between the "motherboard" and that metal bottom case surely can't make for a great connection.
Yes now that would be fun to see, and I guess its best start planning on the cleaning kit backpack set-up Ya will need aswell. I'm guessing alot of them are going to need a dusting before testing :)
@@DieAlteistwiederda Or you could take out your phone in a record store and look up the songs on youtube. Or ask the store to play the record for you, as most stores I visit will do or have dedicated listening stations. But, no, I guess it's cooler to carry a crappy turntable and headphones or bluetooth speaker around with you when record shopping. Totally makes sense.
Seeing what is inside - everything important is serviceable and replaceable - truly sparked my interest in this. Thanks for pointing out another interesting audio product. Now I'm moving into the phase where I justify why I need this (I don't!).
That dampened movement of the arm lifting when you activate it already is pure engineering pornography. Using the evermore ubiquitous USB-C as power in and common internal batteries also is a very nice touch. Maybe there'll be an updated version with a way of adjusting speed manually, or at the very least via bluetooth.
What a wondeful channel. I know very little about video and audio devices, but I learn more each time I watch. It's also very soothing to have your videos on whilst painting, so thank you.
So glad I found your channel, love the content, love your voice, and much like this device, hits a market previously unfilled. There are many RU-vidrs doing reviews, of course, but yours is unique and appreciated.
Pretty cool; nice that it appears the speed could be adjusted via software updates which would be a heck of a lot more precise then a resistive pot. Sad that they swapped left and right leading to your disaster. lol Still, my bet is they will fix yours pronto since you do have one of the best review sites for such technology out there, T. :)
Back in the 80's, with a huge record playing market, the portable record player was a niche device. They succeeded so well that companies stopped manufacturing them.
It quite a neat machine. I'm very impressed how modular the design is. Aside from the wires leading up to the stylus, all of the parts seem repairable and replaceable. Good luck trying that with typical modern electronics. I even like that they use a raspberry pi zero. Using off the shelf components that can do the job good is better than trying to reinvent the wheel and failing at it.
For sake of comparison, what is an example of a modern electronic device that isn't repairable in your mind? Are you speaking mainly of the raspberry pi and batteries inside this unit? Or all the surface mount components that are in pretty much everything made these days?
@@gordonshumway7465 not OP, but modern smartphones are a great example. Manufacturers try their damnedest to prevent people from being able to fix their phones so that they will buy a new one. Holding them together with plastic clips that are fragile instead of screws, parts being glued together, soldered ribbon cables instead of proper connectors. Replacing an old worn out battery in most modern phones is a proper pain when it should be just as simple as popping the back off and swapping it. I haven't seen a smartphone since 2016's LG V20/G5 that let you do that. Same thing with replacing a screen that has shattered.
@@frank97865 I think the main reason that replaceable batteries went the way of the dodo was water resistance - people wanted phones that wouldnt become paperweights if dropped in the bathtub or covered in spilled drink. It's a lot harder to implement ingress protection with a case that isn't fully, permanently sealed. (I suspect the same goes for the 3.5mm jack.)
Why did they have to put the sockets right next to the platter? That's begging for cables rub the disc while it plays. Not to mention the wow - hope that was just a faulty sample and not sloppy design. Anyway, thanks for another great vid to watch on a Saturday Matt 🙂
The record player looks fantastic and I am glad to see that Coturn has already reached out to the community here to ensure positive feedback about your concerns for the turntable. I will definitely consider buying one in the future.
Thanks Mat for this presentation. glad some small teams are working on this, I can easily imaging a more accurate version with direct drive with steady RPM and better end of play detection as it's easy to address when you have a wider angle move in a short time. makers gadgets can do amazing stuff these days.
Talking about clever record players got me thinking of one I saw back in the 80's some time. I remember that CD's were still the new thing and the players was pretty freaking expensive and Philips were still claiming that 14 bits were all you needed when decoding CD's, so it might have been some time around 85 or so. However what caught my eye was a prototype record player that used linear tracking and used a laser instead of a traditional pickup. The "laser pickup" was moved using pneumatics and they demonstrated the tracking by mounting a LP record a few centimeters off center. It was pretty fun to see the "pickup" slid back and forth to keep the laser tracking the grove in the record. This was the first and last time I saw anything like that. I did occasionally read about someone who was said to be working on non contact methods to play records, which usually meant they used a laser, but I've never seen any IRL or even heard much about the audio quality they achieved. One thing they talked about when I saw that prototype was that the laser would be able to read the deepest part of the grove where usually the needle would not contact. That way they would be able to get good quality from badly worn records. But I have no idea if that ever worked out for them.
THe interesting thing about that, thinking about it, would be that records made to be read with a laser could be mastered without the RIAA filtering, which is there to cut the heavy bass and keep the needle from jumping out of the groove. With a laser you could master the record same as you would a CD. Downside is that laser-mastered records wouldn't work right in a needle player. Standard older records played in a laser player would need the reverse RIAA filtering applied in the pre-amp, which could be just a toggle switch. Another benefit is that you could play old 78 rpm shellac records from the early 1900s without worrying about damage as well.
I think the only laser record player that exists on the market is the ELP laser turntable, and if i recall correctly techmoan has mentioned in a previous video that he would never review it since: 1. It's ridiculously expensive. 2. It only plays black records. 3. You also need a ridiculously expensive wet cleaner for records since it can't handle any dust or dirt. So yeah, cool tech but apparently not that good.
@@IsoMacintosh Yep, that's about what I suspected as I never heard anything more about it back then. But for 1980's tech it was pretty radical. I especially loved the tiny air hoses going to the pickup(?). Now that I think about it I can only think of one reason for them to do that. I bet that the pickup was running on air bearings in addition to being moved by pneumatics. The more I think about it the more ridiculous the thing becomes. If they used air bearings there then it kind of would make sense it they used it for the turntable also. The level of engineering that went into that thing is absolutely off the chart. And then it went nowhere... That is unless it over time turned into this ELP turntable. I don't know if I mentioned it in my previous post, but I can't remember that they actually let us hear how it sounded. This was at a big HiFi fair and it seemed the booths were trying to compete in who could pump out the most obnoxious music so it wasn't really something I thought much of at the time. What was interesting wasn't how well that thing sounded but that it worked at all. Especially with the record mounted off center on the turntable. Seeing the pickup wiz back and forth like a demented shuttlecock and not skipping was enough to make you believe that the rest must be at least decent...
@@RCAvhstape Well like I (think) I wrote this player was said to be able to read standard records, and as it had no contact with the surface it would not cause any wear. It was also said to be able to get good quality sound out of severely worn and even damaged records so it could be used to save rare recordings. Digging deep into my murky memory I seem to remember something about the national radio company getting some new machine that could wring the last remaining life out of their massive record archive. Last I heard they had over one million recordings, or as they called them, phonograms. These ranged from about 150.000 LP and 60.000 78 rpm discs to over 2000 vax phonograph cylinders. So just perhaps this was something they invested in.
OH man I wanted to back this last year but I didn't have the cash to front at the time. I ended up getting a different table and I couldn't justify just going ahead and putting in for it. Absolutely exquisite design... So neat to actually see a review of it!
This is great. I can now listen to my records while camping or on long plane trips. But mostly I'd use it in my car. I already keep my entire vinyl collection in the back seat. I don't understand who this is for.
Playing your 45 of "Hully Gully" at the beach! Like the old magazine ads for battery portables promised. Until some kid runs by and kicks sand into the works.
I appreciate the honest opinion and review here. Because I think a stylish product like this would be great for those needing a turn table. I don't feel the need to ever acquire vinyl again sadly. I have moved on from needing expensive bulky fancy equipment when I can play cd quality or better digital audio on relatively decent equipment and decent headphones that are small and appropriate for me. I still love these videos of you exploring audio technology.
My new washer has touch controls and beeping noises. My old washer (it was over 20 years old and the only thing it needed in all that time was a new belt) had knobs. It could be repaired but it would take about two or three months to get the parts and it would have to go in the shop.
I thought that the flutter was apparent in "O care mio" so I wasn't surprised about the meter readings. They can't just add mass to the turntable so I don't know if there is an "easy fix" for this problem. Maybe add a flywheel to the motor shaft, if the flutter comes from motor instability rather than platter friction? Or make a closed loop control which would also solve the speed inaccuracy.
@15:22 There is a flywheel on the platter shaft. Additionally, a flywheel will not negate wow and flutter. The motor circuits must be designed and built properly to make that happen.
It clearly has an optical gap for counting the platter speed. That should be running a closed loop already, and that in turn should reference one of the quartz crystal oscillators in there (the thing has radios with far tighter timing), perhaps via one of the PWM or GPCLK outputs on the Raspberry Pi Zero W it uses. It all makes it baffling that they'd be several percent out on long term speed.
@@absalomdraconis pigpio has several examples of frequency counters achieving 1µs sample rates from 2014 (and another RPM monitor sample from 2016, but they didn't describe its accuracy). Of course, nothing stops you from implementing worse things. Latency is another story, and that as well as the large gaps may make it hard to reduce jitter. Whatever mechanism they did implement is could be operating on too short term a loop to achieve accurate speed (assuming there's a loop in place). It might e.g. not have a measurement for a full revolution of the platter, making it highly sensitive to things like the alignment of each hole. That's a reason to use slits instead of round holes. A possible workaround is comparing the timing of each edge to the previous timing of the very same edge, to remove its phase relation to the others.
I'm not normally a record player person (never owned one and doubt I ever will) but I think this looks amazingly promising. If this were fully functional from the box (little to "no" wow or flutter, correct stereo channeling), it would be amazing. So stylish, so sleek, so simple, so small, so perfect. If I imagined one myself this is pretty much precisely what it would be like.
Unfortunately, Mat, we're in a market that has the average consumer thinking a single bluetooth speaker sounds "good", excessive bass is "good", and audio quality doesn't matter as long as it's loud. I think the time of hi-fi has passed, sadly.
Yeah, I´m afraid you´re right. I grew up in the 60s, when HiFi was becoming a big thing which lasted for a couple of decades, and I now lament the lack of quality consciousness shown by the general consumer.
Part of the problem is 'hi fi' was never clearly defined in the first place. It was more marketing blather than a real set of specifications or standards. When the term 'high fidelity' was first coined, it was slathered on everything that made sound. And most of it sounded medicre at best.
You gotta understand at the end of the day all people want is to play their music at a good volume. Me personally I would love a modern day hifi system but there's no point when I can buy a good quality portable Bluetooth speaker in my opinion for 50 bucks. The mindset nowadays is buy what works at a good price I guess.
Most people want to listen to music, not to play records. They don’t want to spend a fortune on tiny, often imperceptible improvements towards a mythical perfection. They want “good enough”, not perfect. Sadly, as Mat says, those who do want more than the bare minimum are hardly catered for any longer.
Hifi is dead because hifi is expensive. Audiophile snobbery has made a good sound quality seem like a futile effort. Because who wants to spend thousands for a sound quality that’s marginally better than a .wav file?
As hard as it is to believe, sometimes it really is impossible to properly recreate or iterate on technology from the past for a number of reasons (having nothing to do with corporate shenanigans though). A good example of this is the Rocketdyne F1 engine used by NASA throughout the Apollo program. It is to this day the most powerful individual rocket engine mankind has created and has yet to be matched. We literally cannot make them anymore, even though we have extant examples to reference. The problem is that not only are the original engineers and their tribal knowledge gone, but many of the engineer-design-build processes have become outmoded, obsolete, or otherwise evolved from techniques, materials, and methods that aren't used anymore today.
Hmm... I can accept your argument for the F1 engine, but I don't see the problem in linear tracking or detecting the edge of the record with infrared light. This might be Dunning-Kruger talking, but I don't *think* it would even take a lot of development to get those to work from scratch with no reference to existing designs. I've been doing a bit of it in my head as I've been reading the comments.
At 16:27 you can see a little Photodiode (? D1?) rightsided from the Motor, placed near the turntable. And in the turntable you can see little holes. Therefore it seems that this ist the speedcontrol by a photoelectric barrier. So i think, the issus with the speed are a software problem.
I love our "regular" turntable on our home component type system but, I can see my wife really loving this if it is made with quality that last. We are in our 50's and vinyl just brings back so many memories.
As someone who goes to record shops and vintage markets quite often, I feel like this would be great for cases like my Demise EP that I found, where the music isn't really online anywhere and I couldn't really test the record. It's portable and reliable ENOUGH to just check a record before taking it home to my DP-300f. I also trust Audio Technica with my life, and as long as that cartridge is supposed to track at 4, it doesn't matter, cus records are designed to track up to 5.5. Definitely not ideal for just home use, but absolutely perfect for testing possible purchases.
Thanks for the video Matt, certainly a player to keep an eye on. It's interesting how it appears there is hardware for closed-loop speed control but they're either not using it with this firmware or there is something potentially wrong with their implementation - I can't imagine 4% was the best they could get in closed-loop.
Closed-loop is called a servo system; those are notoriously hard to get right. It takes experience, so I think they'll be able to sort it out with time, and send out a firmware update to fix it.
@@JohnDlugosz I thought the joke was funny, but I didn't know that. It's good to know; thanks! The actual PAL experience I have is with 8-bit computers; PAL slowing whole games down to 5/6 speed and, in Ataris, taking the music tuning with it. (I still like the PAL-Atari accidental music scale. ;) I was a bit confused by your joke but laughed anyway because I got that it was something to do with timing.
Hopefully there will be a second release (CT-02?) in future that irons out the main issues brought up in this video. If so, I might consider getting one for myself. I say that they missed an additional opportunity to make the USB connection support data so people could use it to record record audio by connecting it to a computer and using a program like Audacity. A feature not a lot of of people would use, to be sure, but something to consider going forward.
I'm sure there's a way to do that with the wifi, and some would prefer to use their own digitizers for quality reasons. Or possibly snobbery. One of the two.
You might want to check out the Sony ps-lx310bt The thing is relatively decently built, not overly expensifve, fully automatic (like the venerated DP-47f) and it has all your modern bluetooth gizmos. I genuinely think it's a great contender for "decent automatic turntable to buy today"
@@gordonshumway7465 I'm not sure you do. You press the start button and the arm moves to the start of the record and lowers itself. What more do you want lol
The reversal of wires shows that something pretty fundamental was either overlooked, or just done plain wrong, in either case, it points to the level of understanding of the designer with regards to the basic mechanics involved with playing vinyl. The speed should be factory set correctly without question and there is also no mention of bias/anti skate and how (or if) it's implemented. Again, any designer who knows the fundamentals would know the importance. Also I feel that the obvious go-to of the AT3600 as the very bottom of the barrel end of the MM cartridge market shows the same. For very little more money, they could have used an AT-VM95C cartridge, supplied with the cheapo conical stylus but this would give the user a four stage upgrade path to a very decent stylus indeed (the VMN95SH). Instead, the user is pretty much stuck with nowhere to go. Altogether a bit of a disappointment, certainly not something I'd be willing to invest in.
THe entire video went right over your head. They're a small team not a mega corporation with millions in R&D. When you fund these things you take that risk as a backer.
@@IvorySoul696 Sure, but getting the basics right is the first thing they should do. A turntable that runs fast and inconsistently is just a fancy paperweight.
@@IvorySoul696 Yes, that's why I said "I'm glad you take the hit". Anyway, you don't need to be a mega corporation to get the stereo the right way round and to test the unit before it ships. You folks give startups a free pass, which is why so many Kickstarter projects are shite.
@@IvorySoul696 They shouldn't have shipped the units in that state. A 4% speedup is ridiculous (though perhaps somewhat more tolerable for residents of countries with 50 Hz television standards, for whom broadcasts of cinematic films and North American television shows are sped up by about the same percentage).
When judging a turntable for speed issues, and they should just put a speed adjustment on every unit, but the weight of the record itself does make a difference. So any record player without speed adjustment is going to have a speed issue because records have different weights
Seeing as how they use a Raspberry Pi though it would be a reasonably trivial addition to add an IR LED and receiver bouncing off a disc with lines on the platter underneath and adjust the speed on the fly depending on the readout, completely negating flutter at least down to the sub 1% level.
If the motor is multi speed a firware update of the raspberry pie where a long hold of the 45 or 35 will allow for the +/- to adjust the speed. But then it is hard to know the correct speed without a strobe thing. Either way the player is a work of art.
It has holes in the table and an LED on one side, probably a photo diode on the other side. To me that seems like it would make software controlling the speed trivial, to per-mille acuracy...
Nice video as always and a big plus that there's only music when the record is playing :) So maybe it should be possible with a frimware update to those dots like on a standard record player to fine tune your speed by pressing 33 or 45 and then plus or minus. Anyways, I'm just guessing as I don't have or use records but it's always interesting to see what others do. My 6yo son was looking at the open VHS player for an hour if I let him, just cassete in, tape out, press off, same again. There is something about mechanical devices like this that's missing with mp3 and streaming. Your Japanese cassette changer (for ambient music and adverts, I forgot the name of the system) was fun to watch, too.
I think most of us are routing for them. Really hope they're successful. Maybe a decent cassette deck next; Raspberry Pi should be able to handle the speed controller and logic. One can only dream.
I don't know why I feel the need to correct this as it makes no difference to your message but movies are a full 24 fps. 23.976 is the framerate when movies are slowed down by 0.01% to fit color NTSC with 3:2 pulldown.
@@eDoc2020 Films are 24. The physical media. I have no idea, but I doubt we ever get a direct conversion. It is easier to speed up the NTSC source that goes to region 1 blurays.
Beautifully designed, clearly aimed at those who value design more than performance. The w&f not only showed on the meters, it was clearly audible as well. And this alone puts the product in the category “not wanted”. Perhaps an update could help but I fear the lack of momentum in the platter design is simply not to be solved by a software update. A beauty to look at, a nightmare for the ears.
While I adore the design, the nifty solutions (such as the audio-based auto-stop), the base concept and even the neat interior, to be brutally honest hearing it did not convince me to drop that amount of money for it. Then again, I see it mainly as "a turntable for ~380EUR", not as "a brand new, portable, battery-powered turntable", which is admittedly a whole different kettle of fish. Overall, I'm happy that it exists, but... not quite there yet.
I also feel like it's a hard sell to listen to an analog record on a digital Bluetooth device. At that point it would be better to use music streaming for portable music.
Aside from the difficulty in replacing the wires, wow. Wow. So rare for a device to be this user repairable, and even rarer for a user repairable device to be this beautiful.
I just love seeing people with their vinyl. It's the only music format I ever got attached to. Can't afford a new turntable but I've had two 1210s that have been going for, gosh, three decades now?
Very cool little turntable. The build quality looks fantastic both externally and internally. I love everything is laid out nice and neat inside and the batteries are replaceable. I do wish the top surface wasn't that piano gloss though, I would prefer something more matte. Shame about the speed though, I hope they resolve that.
I'd very much love to hear a Techmoan distillation of Project IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.). It is a fascinating archival method for old and fragile recordings, primarily old wax cylinders. However, there are not a lot of good RU-vid videos on the subject, and when I mention it to people I rarely find anyone who is familiar with it. I recognize that this may be a subject where presenting actual hardware and actually demonstrating the process in the Techmoan studio may not be practical, but your ability to present information is on a level that Morgan Freeman could only aspire to.
It looks like a fantastic device, but I'm really perturbed to hear there's no speed tuning capability. That is basic functionality that should be on any turntable of decent quality. Since it's battery operated, there's a good chance the motor is PWM driven, which means fine speed adjustments could have been very easy to implement.
That music at 5:18 wasn’t played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He’s used Spitfire Audio’s plugin to replay samples recorded by the BBCSO and used MIDI to play them back. But to suggest it was played by them by using their name in big red letters is misleading.
It looks like a piece of jewelry - considering the video quality and my 9" tablet screen. For audiophiles and vinyl enthusiasts it looks to be a nice piece of hardware, somewhat retro-futuristic look, good audio quality, good battery time, etc. It's really enjoyable, even for me, a person who doesn't like pop-hiss noises (in the end of my childhood compact disc players were already a thing, although not affordable for everyone.) However, I'm not into mechanical devices for music playing, like turntables or reel tape player, cassette players or anything else that needs some sort of adjustment/repair at any given time. Even with my tinnitus that bugs me for decades with my both ears 24x7 making a sound like an old cathode ray tube, I'd rather stick to FLAC audio files and a good pair of speakers. Thank you for sharing and making an honest review of such nice piece of equipment.
