Technology

What makes the THE+RECORD PLAYER special

Philosophy

Turntables and record players are different things. Turntables must be plugged into separate amplifiers and speakers to make music while record players are single, self-contained units with a turntable, amplifier and speakers built in. One power cord, no connections. The problem with most record players is that they mostly sound awful. Clustered at the bottom end of the vinyl market they have cheap speakers, cheap tonearms, and cartridges that audiophiles describe as vinyl chewers.

Our commitment is to deliver the best integrated turntable audio system, not just another all‐in‐one stereo system. We had to reject a number of standard available parts that did not fit the goal and engineer special ones to our specification.
 

Phono Stage

Our choice of a good quality Pro‐Ject turntable and Ortofon cartridge is obvious. It’s sitting right up top for you to see. The sound quality is good and they cost less than many audio buffs spend for power cords alone.

Phono Preamp

The first thing the phono signal interacts with is the phono preamp. We use an unusually sophisticated circuit that incorporates ultra low‐noise amplifier stages and passive equalization (EQ) often used in expensive separate phono preamps for its accurate, effortless and strain-‐free sound. The RIAA accuracy of our phono preamp is within 0.5dB across the board.

Speakers

The speakers used in THE+RECORD PLAYER are very special. We developed an excellent little small diameter woofer specifically for this product. It features an inverted dome-shaped all aluminium “cone” attached to an unusually long aluminium voice coil. The tweeter is special too and enhances the system's ability to best reproduce voices.

Amplifier

The signal is cleanly amplified by a sophisticated digital signal processor and quiet, efficient class D amplification. There are a grand total of 6 amplifiers hiding inside for total output of 100W (2x35W to the woofers ) + (2x15W to the tweeters).

Cabinet

The cabinet isn’t just the clothes of the system that hides the body, it’s also the skeleton.

We used a hybrid of Transmission Line and Bass Reflex techniques to develop extended bass for its size, without excessive resonances that can emphasize the feedback problem. We tweaked the geometry to have TL characteristics in the upper bass range, but with reinforcement of the lowest frequencies by conventional vented-‐box action.

Specifically placed internal panels that form the internal line‐tunnel and port provide significant bracing. This combined with a precise alignment of the speakers within, cancel the primary vibrations and constrain the secondary ones to keep them from affecting the stylus.

DSP and Voicing

The +AUDIO team spent several weeks with both male and female listeners ranging from age 18 to age 70 to optimize the system voicing. The goal was to create a natural sounding sound field in a typical living space.