What Goes Around Comes Around

It’s not just Revival purists and DJs who are buying vinyl records these days – more and more of us are returning to the ritualistic pleasure of playing music the old-fashioned way. According to BPI, which represents the UK’s music industry, more than 3.2m records were sold last year in Britain, a rise of 53 per cent on the previous year. No surprise then that a number of brands are capitalising on vinyl’s renewed popularity by releasing futuristic, design-led turntables.

Since Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, not much has changed in the world of turntable design – and when digital audio came to the fore, any impetus to innovate disappeared. But now there's a genuine hunger for change, with crowdfunding platform Kickstarter emerging as a breeding ground for cutting-edge new designs.

Towards the end of last year, MAG-LEV Audio successfully raised over $500,000 for a brilliantly designed turntable that incorporates a levitating platter. Earlier this year, Taiwanese brand HYM smashed the target for its Seed turntable (which claims to be “the world’s first all-in-one turntable system that integrates excellent fidelity sound and 70W output”), before Dutch brand Miniot followed suit with Wheel, a turntable that dispenses with the traditional tone arm, instead positioning the stylus underneath the record and using the centre spindle to control all functions (play, pause, skip track).

Of this new crop of Kickstarter-funded turntables, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated is the Yves Béhar-designed Love (pictured, above): “the world’s first intelligent turntable”.

“It’s an exciting proposition, and an enormous challenge, to reinvent something as timeless as the turntable,” Béhar tells us. “While technology has greatly improved since the era of vinyl, the experience you get when playing a record is something people still crave.”

Love is an entirely novel concept in that the device spins on top of a still record. It can be controlled by a smartphone to play, skip and repeat tracks, alter volume and select different RPM, and it even connects to your speakers or headphones wirelessly via Bluetooth or wi-fi.

“The Love turntable brings the best of old and the new – the warm texture of vinyl audio, with the benefits of modern technology,” says Béhar. To purists, the idea of blending old and new might seem sacrilegious, but somehow we don’t think these turntables were created with them in mind.

This article is taken from the Goodwood magazine, Autumn 2017 issue