As I mentioned earlier, there were a number of impetus to my designing a record player, and that gathering at Steve's place was one of them. Two of my Asian distributors were instrumental too - my Hong Kong/China distributor who would go on to give me a pre-order, and my Thai distributor who brought me to the father/son team of Harry and Mat Weisfeld.
I was "infected" by having access to excellent tape. That started with Todd Garfinkle's mastertape of Ito Ema playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. Making the direct-to-disc album Four Seasons in Jazz allowed me to hear the difference between a lacquer, a pressing, the direct-to-tape and a digital backup. It made me realize that every turntable adds something and takes away something else, and I strove to do something that would be as close to hearing the reference lacquer on the lathe as possible.
The principle of the design is to be “as simple as possible, but no simpler”. Hence, we eschew the “brute force” design of massive weight with huge columns of steel and aluminum, in favor of a more considered approach.
The objective of the Record Player is very simple - to rotate a record smoothly without short-term or long-term fluctuations of speed. While short-term fluctuations can be measured in wow and flutter, long-term fluctuations are audible but lack their own quantification and are far more difficult to address.
To achieve this, we went the simpler route of direct drive; thus eliminating the need to design high-precision pulleys and belts. The direct-drive used on the Record Player is a unique brushless, iron-less, high-torque, ultra-low vibration motor drive system from VPI (the "big brother" of the excellent motor that they used on their 40th Anniversary machine). To this, we added the Genesis Dynamic Power Delivery System (DPDS) for an ultra-smooth rotation.
The motor uses a unique composite stator with embedded electromagnetic coils instead of the usual wire-wound slotted iron. Thus, the cogginess that is normally associated with some direct-drive motors is completely eliminated due to the absence of magnetic materials in the stator – much like our experience of using an air-core inductor in a loudspeaker crossover.
The unique zero-feedback drive system from VPI means that there are no long time-scale flunctuations. The DPDS contributes the means to deliver constant and consistent current to the motor drive electronics and absorb the back EMF from the motor (much like how the DPDS delivers current to my reference amplifiers). Combined, these elements give record playback the coveted quality of tape (our reference source).
The music signal as inscribed in a long play record is tiny – a 3dB change in loudness is represented by a physical difference of about 0.1µm (0.004 mil) in the groove. With this in mind, we looked at the magnitude of vibration control on a completely different dimensional scale.
What was needed was the control of micro-vibrations; not the judder caused by bumping into the Record Player, or the tremor of foot-falls on a badly-constructed floor (those still need to be addressed, just not the focus of this design).
Therefore, we addressed vibration and resonance control from the point of:
- Stylus/Groove interface
- Impact of sound waves on the structure
- Motor (and bearing) generated noise
- Power supply transformer vibrations
The main component of this vibration control is done using an 11-layer carbon-fiber composite and wood sandwich that we’ve developed over the past 10 years and used effectively for our loudspeaker cabinets. This is the plinth for the all-important motor/tonearm interface. The plinth is then spiked to a HMWA platform and this platform is hung from the superstructure with a low-Q low-compliance suspension system.
The Record Player incorporates an integral rack that controls and manages any air-borne and transformer-generated vibration. Rather than being absolutely rigid, the rack has a slight “give” that absorbs and dampens vibrations generated by the various transformers in the power supply or carried through the air.
Structure-borne vibrations (assuming that the floor is adequately engineered) will be primarily vertical in amplitude. The potential frequency that this will occur at is filtered out by the spiked/hung suspension system. So, when you cue down, there is astonishing lack of vinyl noise when compared to other turntables.
With the proliferation of electronics, computers and digital equipment in the home, there is a lot of pollution on the sine wave of the power supply. This electrical pollution pushes power supplies to work harder to filter out all the noise.
Some power conditioners and many devices shunt this noise to ground, resulting in a noisy ground plane if impedance to Earth is not sufficiently low. Unfortunately, the system ground can be a backdoor for noise if this is not properly addressed. A power-conditioning “Juice Box” delivers pure power to the Motor Drive and the Premium Platinum phono stage. It filters the noise pollution on the AC mains by converting this noise to heat and it isolates noise in the ground plane, and still providing a ground for the tonearm to dissipate static.
Sometimes, noise can come in from the ground (pin 1) of the XLR output, or if a single-ended preamp is used, from the ground of the RCA connector. Such noise on the signal-ground can travel all the way to the cartridge and be amplified by the phono stage. Thus, the Genesis Premium Platinum phono stage is included in the system to ensure that the care taken in eliminating mechanical and power noise does not get negated by in-coming noise from the ground of the output connector.
As a system, the Record Player by Genesis and VPI is designed to be a black-box source of music. It is isolated electrically from the mains power supply, and at the output it is isolated from the system it plays into.
What I like to say is that you plug in AC, add a record, and music comes out.