Ode to a Swiss Turntable

I feel worse about this than I have after attending some funerals. After 30 plus years, I am retiring my much beloved Goldmund Studio turntable with a Goldmund T3F tonearm. If I had a dollar for every time this turntable made my brain sing, I would be a wealthy man. I can however, attest to the fact that I found great comfort in benefiting from riches in lieu of dollars for all the joy that table provided over several decades of use.





I, along with almost every audiophile at the time, coveted the Goldmund Reference that for lack of a better descriptor, Harry Pearson put on the map in the late 80’s. At the time, I certainly could not afford a Goldmund Reference, but broke the piggy bank to buy a Goldmund Studio and one of the latest versions of the famed T3F arm which was a demo piece from a well-known dealer in Philly. The Studio and T3 arm (originally a T3B) was actually first made in 1981, well before Goldmund introduced their Reference Table in 1986. Although the Studio was not the Reference, its sound quality was, and still is, superb by any standard. Its sheer musicality is outstanding and never gets in the way of listening. Its midrange is about as good as it gets, and when set-up properly, has unbelievable dynamics, transparency, slam, and excellent bass. The key is that “set-up” is a bitch and then some. There are more tricks to setting this thing up than Carter’s has liver pills, and applying the full measure of these tricks took the better part of those 30 years to navigate. The good news, is that I think I’ve finally mastered it!! (As one of my patients once told me, his daddy’s favorite expression about him was “he may not be smart, but he sure is slow”. I can relate.) We all know everything matters in audio, but the Studio/T3F pushed me to my limits. The miniscule requisite forward angle of the tonearm carriage; the tracking force which cannot be adjusted with a fine tuning knob but rather with big clunky weights; the cartridge azimuth which must be adjusted with head shell shims as there is no azimuth adjustment on the arm; the VTA which requires miniscule adjustments of surgical precision to get right; the optimal rotation and position of the springs under the platter; and last but not least, the damn silicon damping fluid trough (which requires optimum levels with +/- 10uL using a lab pipette) comprise many of the mind-numbing hurdles one has to clear to get this thing to perform it’s best. But when it does, it’s a delight indeed. I’ve used several cartridges but for most of its life, Benz cartridges have served me well, going way back to a Benz MC-3 that Dave Wilson was quite fond of, then to a Ruby, and Ruby 2 and culminating in a Benz LPS currently. For all the cursing I did in setting the table up in all its iterations over 30+ years, it is the joy of making music with it that I will always remember fondly. I really love this thing and will truly be sad to see it go.

I’ve paired the TT with a long list of preamps and phono stages covering the usual suspects (ARC, VTL, Krell, etc.), but my current Zanden 1200 MkIII is the current cat’s meow and is more than ready to welcome its new replacement which is this:



https://dohmannaudio.com/helix-one/

The acquisition of the Dohmann Helix 1 Mk II has more twists and plot turns than an Agatha Christie novel. It was actually the 3rd table I made an offer for, having failed at buying a Kodo Beat SE and a Wave Kinetics NVS after making offers that I thought were accepted only to be withdrawn in the 11th hour. I initially hesitated on making an offer for the Dohmann because I presumed it was unobtainable at the asking price, but desperation is a funny thing. I had nothing to lose except my pride so I made an offer that was fortunately, ultimately accepted.

More on this potentially outstanding table when it completes its first round of set-up and listening. Although my Goldmund has been the one piece of audio gear I owned for the longest time, every cloud does indeed have a silver lining and the Dohmann looks like it could genuinely be a very nice ray of sunshine as it undertakes its new role as the last TT I will likely ever own. We shall soon see.

 

Marty, any impressions to be shared with us? I am eagerly awaiting your follow up...

 

The Reed 3P arrived last week and the armboard is currently at Dohmann's in Australia for drilling. He had to make an adapter as the platter is 60mm above the base and the Reed is only adjustable to a height of 48 mm above the base. I'm as eager as you are to hear the darn thing! Shouldn't be that far away now although I will probably not post until I think I have the ZYX /Reed/Dohmann combo sounding at least as good as the Goldmund Studio/Benz LPS combo. I suspect that might take a few weeks.

 

Thanks, Marty. Have been using Helix 1 for 4-5 years myself. The only piece of my audio chain which has not been changed. Love it! And thinking now to upgrade it to mk2 status. That’s why eager to receive your feedback.

 

Just FYI, Fremer has reviewed the Helix 1 MKII in current issue of Stereophile.

 

Waiting to see your feedback on Helix 1 MKII as a long time (or only one at least in my country) Helix 2 user... ^^

Different from my original thoughts, Helix seems to be quite sensitive table to properly tune... but efforts were worth it (at least for me..)

 

Part 1

It's been quite a while since I received my Dohmann Helix One Mk 2 turntable and thus an update report is appropriate. Unfortunately, I purchased the turntable from an unreliable individual which necessitated replacement of some parts in order to make the Helix the star it is supposed to be. Enter Mark Doehmann (his name is spelled differently than the company name- a story for another day), who has gone well beyond the beyondo in providing prompt communication and support that is more than I could have hoped for in order to make things right. Recall that Mark Doehmann is the designer and manufacturer of the legendary Continuum Caliburn turntable and Cobra arm. He apparently sought to up his game with his new company, Dohmann Audio, which now manufactures the Helix One and Helix Two turntables.

The parts that were required to repair my table were not trivial. Somehow the bearing post and the bearing well or damaged when I received the turntable. Therefore these parts had to be returned to Australia for repair. Mark actually replaced them with new parts without any hesitancy and at no charge! Although I did not purchase the unit from a dealer, and as Mark explained to me, if he buys a Porsche and something goes wrong with it he ultimately looks to Porsche to stand behind the product and not the dealer. That is his philosophy with his turntable as well, and needless to say, when you buy a used product and the manufacturer replaces them with new parts at no charge, that is something you don’t see every day. If you think that endears me to Mark, it gets better. I chose to mount a 12” Reed 3P on the Helix. Among the many reasons I went this route is that I was attracted to the ease of adjustments for all 4 major settings, tracking force, VTA, anti-skate and azimuth. Moreover all but tracking force can be done on the fly. I know that many are happy adjusting VTA using, for example, a deck of playing cards, which seems to be a nice technique for some arms. However the thickness of a playing card is about 200 microns. After owning my Goldmund T3F for many years, I found that VTA adjustments were critical in far less increments, and I really wanted something that could allow for adjustments within 50 microns which can be done fairly easily, and more importantly, reproducibly as they are on the Reed. Furthermore, I have yet to meet any tonearm rig where azimuth is set perfectly at absolute “top dead center” (ie. 90 degrees) as it’s just not realistic to believe that every stylus is set to perfection at a 90 degree angle to the top of the cartridge body. So for me, having the flexibility of easily adjusting the azimuth to 1 degree on the fly is a very valuable feature for optimal performance.

However, while in theory the Helix and Reed looked like an attractive match, little did I know that I would be the first person on the planet to attempt mounting a 12” 3P on the Dohmann Helix One Mk2. And therein lies the rub. The tale of mounting the 12” 3P on the Dohmann armboard was a laborious journey down a pathway fraught with potential peril at several turns. Fortunately, Mark was able to contact Ruta Triukiene at Reed in Lithuania to work out the appropriate engineering to accomplish this with the necessary precision that would assure the correct cartridge geometry using a custom 20mm thick spacer that elevated the base of the Reed sufficiently so it would work with the height of the Helix platter. Ruta was fantastic in their prompt response and worked with Mark who fabricated the adapter and custom armboard required using 3D modeling.

After a few rounds of design and fabrication, the completed rig looks like this:








So now that you understand why it has taken several months for this project to get its legs, how does it sound? In a word, pretty damn good.

 

Part 2

If I could measure every moment of joy and comfort of my Goldmund Studio/T3F/Benz LPS set-up for about 30 years, I’d be indebted to it in gratitude for another 30 years. Naturally, the first question I wanted to answer for myself was obviously this: Is the Helix/Reed/ZYX combo significantly better than the Goldmund rig? As already suggested, the answer is a resounding yes. But let’s keep hyperbole in check. The sound of the Dohmann set-up fits somewhere between the sound of the Goldmund rig and the sound of having the Philadelphia Orchestra in your listening room! Now where exactly it is on that continuum, I’m honesty not quite sure because the ZYX is not fully broken in yet (and was sitting on my shelf unused for about a year!). However, audiophiles measure small changes of performance non-linearly (every drop looks like a gallon). Sure I can use the usual accolades, better this and better that, more natural, more detailed, more nuance, better dynamics, etc. But these are all just really ways of describing the most meaningful and essential observation, which is that I think the sound now brings me closer to the music. The sound is just more relatable to the real thing than ever before and is yet another successful step of getting closer to the door that you can never go through but always aspire to go through constantly by moving half way closer to the door with each step. (The obvious paradigm is you can never get out of the door with this method but the steps do indeed get smaller with each step).

It will take me quite some time to try and figure out what improvements are due to which components, if one can actually even do such a thing without substituting and testing each component individually which is just not going to happen. To begin I can probably start by stating unequivocally that the dynamics are simple extraordinary. I recall hearing the ZYX Uni Premium a few years ago in Steve’s system and that property was apparent. So there’s that. But the quiet background of the Helix almost certainly allows that feature to be compounded. The ZYX is still breaking in and so I have to be patient before I can speak to its attributes more accurately. Does it have that elusive sheer musicality with the “I never have to think that it’s a cartridge playing” property that is so endearing with the Benz LPS? I hope so but it only has 40 hours on it, so the answer is, not yet. But it sure has all the makings of it. Orchestral instrument placement and detail are already superior at this stage. One thing that it has going for it is that it is the cartridge that Yamada-san uses at Zanden to design and voice his phone stage. Naturally my thinking is, if It’s good enough for Zanden, it’s surely good enough for me. I think its riches are yet to be fully uncovered. I should add that there is no need to set cartridge loading with the Zanden 1200 Mk3 as the first input stage is transformer coupled. The Zanden allows for a “low” impedance and "high” impedance input. The Benz uses the “high” setting and the ZYX uses the “low” setting of the Zanden. Yamada-san told me these inputs will cover the vast majority of all cartridges currently made, but he can always customize an input to a specific cartridge if necessary should the current settings not suffice.

Regarding Reed’s magnificent wood and metal tonearm, the choices of wood and their properties is nicely documented on the Reed website:
https://www.reed.lt/5174/research/wood-vs-the-rest-testing-armtube-material/

As Ruta said “tonearm effective mass would be matched with cartridge parameters. Different wood we recommend because they have different weight and we can have different effective mass tonearms.” She suggested that the best match for the ZYX on a 3P would be Pernambucco (Brazilwood) or Ebony. I chose the former because it seemed to have a more neutral resonance than Ebony between 0.5 and 1.0 Hz as well as between 2.0 and 2.5 Hz. Does this matter? Who knows? But Ruta said Pernambucco is a great match for the ZYX so I went for it. I just admire Reed for publishing the acoustic characteristics of all their wood tonearms so as to educate the users accordingly.

Two other features of the Reed are worth noting. First, the azimuth adjustment, which can be done on the fly, is very unique in that it employs a yoke bearing with a “roll” adjustment that “swings” around the needle tip, which keeps all other tonearm parameters intact. The sonic benefits of “locking in” the correct azimuth are easily heard in real time. If one is playing orchestral music, the ability to achieve the lowest distortion levels in both the violins on the left and the celli on the right that provides a “rightness” in the balance between both channels that is easily heard. Another clever design feature of the Reed is their magnetic anti-skating which has several benefits that includes the elimination of possible noises and unnecessary friction caused by traditional string and weight mechanical antiskating devices. It’s slick system but honestly, this may be a trivial advantage since the current thinking is that anti-skate forces are generally much lower than what were previously used for most cartridges as confirmed both sonically and by sophisticated analysis programs (i.e. AnalogMagik). However, that the Reed anti-skate can be adjusted on the fly is simply priceless. I’ve been impressed that the sonic differences of a little as a quarter of a turn of the anti-skate adjustment can have rather notable sonic results. Taken together, the Reed’s ability to dial-in both azimuth and anti-skate with precision in real time really goes a long way in accepting the accommodation one has to make when going from a straight arm design to a pivoted arm design (where these parameters are essentially non-issues). At least this was especially true for me, who never thought could tolerate the compromises of a pivoted tonearm design.

 

Part 3

So let’s talk about the remarkable Döhmann Helix One Mk2. This table has received numerous accolades with good reason. To begin, it’s visually quite stunning and is beautifully well-made. Unlike its immediate predecessor, the Helix One Mk2 has a new custom designed Swiss-manufactured motor designed to Döhmann Audio’s specifications which incorporates the very latest technology around constant torque performance and quietness of operation. While you can go to the website to check its myriad of unique features, https://dohmannaudio.com/helix-one/ the one is most apparent and well publicized is its fully integrated MinusK vibration isolation system utilizing its Negative Stiffness Mechanism technology. This is a feature that one can discuss at some length.

What we have all wondered at one time or another is if you're going to use some sort of suspension to provide turntable and tonearm isolation from floor/airborne/other vibrations, which works best? There are basically 3 that appear relatively common in audio use: a) pneumatic, b) piezoelectric and c) negative stiffness vibration isolators (net vertical stiffness is made very low without affecting the static load-supporting capability of a spring). It is the latter that is employed by MinusK.

They all seem to work with reasonable efficacy. One can get a sense of how will they work by looking at the transmissibility data that the manufacturers provide, although this is no guaranty of evaluating performance when comparing apples to apples as they all perform testing with similar but not identical methodology and present only their own data. As far as I know, no independent lab has ever tested all 3 types of isolation devices or methods in an identical fashion. The amount of suppression they each provide is generally specified in both a horizontal and vertical plane. You can easily look at data and graphs from each manufacturer and they will generally all look like they have more in common than there are differences. Like everything else audio specifications are nice but do not necessarily correlate to sound. I have no clue which one "sounds" the best. However, if one looks at transmissibility graphs, the Minus K data may have a slight edge at some frequencies, but I consider that "so what?" data. Might be meaningful, might not.

Here's what I do know. In a lab environment where noise if relatively constant (i.e., floor-borne vibration from an air conditioning or HVAC heating system typically in the basement or roof) the piezeoelectric devices make a good deal of sense to me. I’ve employed them in large labs I’ve run for use with electron microscopes and frequency sensitive spectrometers. These are devices that sense the environment, and apply feedback to suppress the equipment on them (in our case, a TT platter) with a nominal delay (typically microseconds). In an audio environment such as music which is constantly changing, I can't imagine why this approach would be as desirable as the pneumatic or negative stiffness vibration based approaches which strive to make the instruments on their platforms "immune" to the environment which, in the case of music, has a generous component of air-borne vibration. Again, this is all theoretical, and may mean nothing. One just has to try these and see what works best in a particular set-up. This is classic vanilla, chocolate, strawberry audiophilia. And of course, none of these beats simply moving the piece you want to isolate to an area that has no acoustic disturbance at all (another room? the neighbor’s house?)

With the Vibraplane that is under my Goldmund Studio, it's simple to do an A/B test with or without the device. Just turn off the device, wait a while, listen to music, and then turn it back on and let the platform rise, which occurs in about 30 seconds. (You can’t do the reverse as easily as it may take several hours to deflate unless you pull off the air tube). The Vibraplane uninflated weighs about 150 lbs so it’s a nice test of the mass vs pneumatic isolation approach but this is not ideal or universal for every TT since they all have different suspensions (including (NO suspension).

Nor surprisingly, it was the Great Karmeli who first suggested some time ago that the Vibraplane may not be the panacea I initially thought it might be, which led to some agonizing A/B comparisons. When performing these A/B tests, I did in fact think that, at least for the Goldmund Studio, some parts of the base region; namely 50-80 Hz, had a solidity that was ever so slightly compromised in comparison to using no Vibraplane at all. However, in the 20-40 Hz region, it was no contest. The Vibraplane delived far more articulate and defined low bass with the Goldmund. I've now done this test about 30 times with a wide range of musical material and I doubt 30 more will change the outcome. Thus for overall bass performance, in the end, I felt the benefit of the Vibraplane handily beat no Vibraplane at all on my Goldmund rig, which it should be noted, is a spring-loaded floating suspension.

It is precisely this frequency trade-off that the MinusK system renders irrelevant. The MinusK system yields bass performance that is exceptional and superior to any other system I have used since it does not favor or enhance any particular range of the bass frequencies. Then again, recall this is with the Helix TT and it is built-in thus not testable as a single variable. But ask me if I care? I do not. The MinusK system seems to optimize performance by minimizing vibrations not only for the full range of low frequencies, but Döhmann Audio worked with MinusK to create a custom version of the platform that is tightly integrated into the turntable chassis to create a seamless transition to minimize vibrations for all frequencies from low to high. The results speak for themselves. Additional technologies Dohmann uses to remove both high and low frequency vibrations include placing the motor, bearing and armboard on separate plates so that they are significantly isolated from each other as well as using a unique composite arm board damping technology to further dissipate energy which is a major contributor to the overall sound quality. In summary, the MinusK NSM technology appears to be a superb solution for a turntable’s requirement for six degrees of freedom with ultra-low natural frequency vibration isolation. What is even better, is that it does this without the need for air or electricity. Very nice indeed. In addition, it also delivers this performance on rack stands that most mere mortals could easily own. One does not need the benefits of concrete or steel pilings into subterranean foundations for the MinusK system to be highly effective. (Of course, neither would that hurt).

The question to be asked (and is in fact asked on the Dohmann website) is whether these efforts are worth all the cost and effort of owning a Dohmann Helix One (or the less expensive and more modest Helix Two)? In a word, yes. I am looking forward to optimizing the sound of my Helix 3P/ZYX in the weeks and months ahead. In the interim, I can’t help but thinking hard about what to put on my second Helix armboard!

stock photo (I couldn't get my iPhone to do it justice)

 

I can’t help but thinking hard about what to put on my second Helix armboard!

don't think too hard...consider VDH MSS or GC

 

great write up Marty. looking forward to more listening feedback as you go along.

for your other arm board; i would recommend a non-uni-pivot arm with a head-shell approach; i suggest the gimbal- bearing Durand Tosca. i sure love mine on my Saskia. it's not 'on-the-fly' adjustment friendly, but very precisely adjustable. and the head shells do allow easy azimuth adjustment.

the Durand website has all the templates to see if it works for your arm board location.

 

Thank you for that terrific and extremely detailed write up, Marty! It sounds like it has been a frustrating process, but I'm glad you finally got to the right place!