Upgrades – Origin Live

Why Most Bearings are Compromised: Tonearm Deep Dive Pt.2

Mark Baker — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:02:13 +0000

BLOG POST

Tonearm Bearings: The Job, and Why It’s So Hard to Get Right

Small job, big impact

A tonearm bearing has one of the smallest jobs in a hi-fi system and yet, one of the most consequential. It has to let the arm pivot freely while the cartridge reads movements measured in microns at 2-4 tonnes of pressure, up to 40,000 times a second. Get it seriously wrong and everything downstream is compromised: timing, tracking, dynamics, imaging, the lot.

After forty years of building, modifying, and rewiring just about every arm on the market, we’ve had a lot of experience with all sorts of bearings up close, as well as discussing many bearing systems with their designers face to face at hifi shows. We’ve compiled our thoughts on different tonearm bearings below.

What a bearing has to do

Four requirements, in tension with each other. Every design is a compromise between them.

Low friction. Records are rarely perfectly centred, so the arm tracks in and out continuously as the platter rotates. Beyond that, the groove itself demands free movement up and down from the tonearm to allow the cartridge to stay central in the groove, as it tracks a 3-dimensional, modulated waveform in much the same way a mogul skier might traverse a mogul field. A high-friction bearing can’t keep up with the demands of this movement, resulting in smeared transients in your music. The stylus drags against the groove instead of riding it, sidewall pressure rises, and record wear accelerates.

Friction: Stiction. Stiction is a type of friction that is another fundamentally important part of tonearm bearing design. Like friction, stiction relates to freedom of movement, namely, peak static friction. This is the force required to initiate movement between two stationary objects; here, it is how easily the tonearm, mounted with a cartridge, allows the bearings to move as the vinyl plays. It is crucial in the tonearm to have low-stiction bearings which can easily move and react to dynamic passages in the music pressed on your vinyl. The highest stiction means the tonearm gets… stuck. High-stiction bearings move very sluggishly and cause tracking errors with the cartridge. Even if it’s not heard in skipping or channel imbalances, high-stiction bearings limit the cartridge’s free movement and tracking. This limits the overall system’s fidelity and damages transients in every respect. Low stiction allows for a fast reaction to dynamics and transitions, benefiting all aspects of the music. The lower the stiction, the better; the higher the stiction? expect to be hearing smearing.

Rigidity. This sounds like a contradiction with low friction, but it isn’t. The bearing should rotate freely around its intended axes and resist everything else. We’re talking about play measured in microns, which sounds trivial until you remember the scale of what the cartridge is tracking and how it amplifies those movements by a factor of thousands. A bearing with even slight backwards-and-forward play introduces shockwaves into the arm every time the stylus hits a transient. This can be improved by adding mass in the right areas and by using some engineering know-how to determine where and how the pivots are placed.

Energy transfer. All tonearms vibrate, at some level. A key task is getting vibration in the arm to leave and, importantly, not to reflect back. The bearing is one of the main exit routes, and also a potential entry point for vibration from the turntable. So which matters more? In an ideal world, you’d want a joint that lets energy flow in one direction but not the other. Some designers will tell you that’s impossible. We disagree: bearings genuinely exhibit asymmetric behaviour depending on their design and geometry, and the right balance depends on the rest of the system. A well-isolated turntable lets you prioritise extracting energy from the arm. A noisier deck pushes you toward keeping energy from getting in.

Reliability. A well-built tonearm should last fifty years or more. We still see arms we built three decades ago performing as they did the day they shipped. Unreliability can creep in through poor-quality components or sloppy assembly, causing components to drift out of alignment over time or fail altogether.

The main families

Gimbal bearings: small ball races on perpendicular axles, the type used in skateboards and countless other applications. Most of the industry uses them. We do too, across our entry-level models, because when they’re done properly, they work very well. The catch is “done properly”: ball size, steel grade, cage design, race smoothness, and tolerance class all matter, and they all sound different. Ball bearings can be high-stiction and harder to move. This is why we specify our own bearings rather than buying them off the shelf, to ensure they are not overly tight and the stiction stays as low as possible.

One detail worth mentioning: where the gimbal sits matters as much as how it’s built. Rega’s arms place the bearings inside the arm tube. When we started modifying Rega tonearms in the eighties, the single most effective change we made was relocating the bearings into the yoke, outside the tube. Bearings vibrate. You don’t want that vibration happening inside the part of the arm carrying the signal.

Uni-pivot bearings: a single spike resting in a cup. Beautifully simple, cheap to manufacture, and inherently low-friction and low-stiction. It dominates the budget end of the high-performance market for good reason. The downsides are real, though: the spike is vulnerable to damage, and a single point can’t constrain rotation around the arm’s own axis, so designers compensate by hanging the counterweight well below the pivot, or in the worst cases, using high-friction cones to stabilise the pivot. Setup is notoriously fiddly, and this bearing type cannot remain stable in the azimuth plane,

There’s a clever variant where the spike locates against three small ball bearings instead of a flat cup floor. Friction increases, but rigidity improves dramatically, and vibration is transmitted out of the arm more effectively. Whether the trade is worth it depends on what you value.

A recent breakthrough in this area has been the SUPATRAC tonearm, which uses a sideways unipivot, meaning the arm’s pivot is locked against the drag of the groove, and cannot shift backwards and forwards during playback. It’s an ingenious design by an ingenious designer and friend. For the SUPATRAC philosophy, it is a coherent design. To achieve our own design goals, however, we employ a dual-pivot bearing.

Dual pivot bearings: What we use across our premium and high-end tonearm ranges. Two points into two cups, either side of the armtube handle vertical movement; conventional gimbals on the same plate handle horizontal rotation. You get the low-friction energy-transfer characteristics of point contact on the vertical axis, the stability and easy setup of gimbals on the horizontal, and adjustable azimuth as a bonus. The other interesting thing about this bearing type is the ability to mass load the pivot and add inertia to all axess.

Is the hybrid a compromise? Deliberately so. No single bearing type wins on all four requirements. A well-executed ball race outperforms a poor uni-pivot; a well-executed uni-pivot outperforms a mediocre ball race. Combining them lets each do what it does best.

Interestingly, three manufacturers in Europe: Kuzma, Moerch and Origin Live, independently arrived at the dual-pivot idea around 15 years ago. Nobody copied anyone. The bearing system just makes sense once you’ve spent enough time with the alternatives.

The exotic options, briefly

Ferrofluid-floated bearings: The arm floats on a bed of magnetic fluid, supposedly decoupling it from the arm board. The decoupling claim doesn’t really hold up. magnetic fluids, magnetic fields, air, and string all transmit vibration. Everything does, to some degree. There are no isolation barriers in this world, only better and worse compromises. This entails a fundamental lack of rigidity that prevents proper tracking of the record groove.

Hanging-thread bearings. The Schröder approach: the arm hangs from a high-tensile thread, sometimes with a paddle dipped in ferrofluid for damping. Genuinely ingenious, excellent freedom of movement. The practical challenge is controlling sway during cueing. Clearaudio’s variant uses a small magnet beneath the arm to stabilise it.

Magnetic bearings. The arm is held between opposing magnets, with nothing solid contacting it. Zero mechanical friction in the bearing itself, but that just throws the spotlight on a point most people miss:

On a well-designed gimbal arm, the arm cable accounts for roughly 70% of the total friction in the bearing system. The bearings themselves are a minority of the horizontal torque problem.

That figure changes how you think about everything. It’s why cable routing matters as much as bearing choice. We hold the cable hole in our yokes to 2mm; even 3mm measurably increases friction, because the cable starts to wander off-axis and create leverage on rotation. It’s also why we route the cable internally. An external run picks up RF, and we’ve measured radio interference even with as little as 4 inches of unshielded cable.

Air bearings. Almost exclusively used on linear-tracking arms. They elegantly solve the tracking-error problem, but linear trackers have inherent issues: the effective mass is high because the entire assembly has to translate sideways, not just pivot. Some well-known designs run at 70g effective mass, which has uncomfortable implications for long-term record wear. A reasonable target is 25–30g — achievable, but the rest of the engineering is hard.

One of the larger issues here is keeping the air pressure genuinely constant and captive. Most air bearing designs have open sides that leak air pressure and allow horizontal play. Another issue here is how the cabling and air hose interact with the moving assembly – these are likely to introduce unwanted forces in the horizontal plane.

Flex bearings. A thin, flexible membrane that bends rather than pivots. The advantage is the elimination of stiction: the slight extra friction required to get a stationary bearing moving. The trade-off is rigidity: to flex easily, the membrane has to be thin, and that thinness also allows vibration in both directions.

What to avoid

A short list of bearings we’d steer clear of as a buyer:

Horizontal-point bearings (two spikes pointing outward from the arm tube into cups). The assembly pressure required to keep the spikes located feeds vibration straight into the tube. We’ve tried it. It sounds poor.
Knife bearings (a knife edge in a V-groove). Effectively obsolete. Reliable forever, but the contact area is enormous, and it fails on three of the four requirements simultaneously.
Ferrofluid-decoupled bearings, for the reasons above.

For everyone else, a general principle: if you don’t want to spend setup time fussing with azimuth and balance, a well-made conventional gimbal is the most user-friendly bearing of the lot. There’s no shame in that; it’s part of why gimbals remain on so much of our range.

In terms of absolute performance, we believe Dual-Pivot excels in all of the listed areas, which is why you’ll find them on the premium and high-end side of our range.

The point

Bearings, like every other element of tonearm design, are about execution. There is no single “best” type. What matters is how well the chosen approach is realised: bearing quality, placement, cable management, and the mass & rigidity of everything around it. The job isn’t to chase a theoretical ideal off the track; it’s to understand the compromises clearly enough to find the best solution, and the other design opportunities that bearing allows.

Tonearm Ranges

For many years, Origin Live Tonearms have earned the highest praise from satisfied owners, and are acclaimed by editors and reviewers as the best they have ever heard.

VIEW HERE

The post Why Most Bearings are Compromised: Tonearm Deep Dive Pt.2 appeared first on Origin Live.

Why Your Tonearm Matters More Than Your Cartridge: Tonearm Deep Dive Pt.1

Mark Baker — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:22:49 +0000

BLOG POST

Why Your Tonearm Matters More Than Your Cartridge

A customer phoned us recently

He’d asked his local dealer whether to upgrade his tonearm. The reply: ” Don’t bother, it won’t make any difference.”

We understand why a dealer might say that. Look at the stylus tracing the groove. A needle moving 20,000 times a second, sometimes 40,000 on the best cartridges, withstanding around a thousand G of force. The conclusion seems obvious. The cartridge is doing the work. Everything else just holds it in place.

But this conclusion is wrong. The gap between what most people believe about tonearms and what actually drives sound quality is why we’ve spent nearly 40 years designing them.

A demonstration in front of 130 engineers

A while back, we presented a lecture to the Institute of Engineering and Technology, a sceptical crowd by nature. To make the point about where performance actually comes from, we set up two systems side by side.

System one: an Origin Live Calypso turntable and Illustrious tonearm with one of our tonearms, around £3,500 at the time of demo, fitted with a £400 cartridge.

System two: an entry-level Pro-ject Juke Box £200 turntable/tonearm combo fitted with the Lyra Atlas, an £8,000 reference cartridge.

Same record, same downstream electronics. The room was unanimous. The cheaper cartridge in a better tonearm and turntable sounded substantially better.

This isn’t an argument against good cartridges. The Atlas is a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s an argument about where in the vinyl playback chain your money does the most work.

The scale problem

To understand why, you have to grasp the scale at which a stylus operates, and how easily it can be interfered with.

A record groove is roughly 40 microns across, about the thickness of a human hair. Within that groove, the stylus is detecting movements as small as a micron at frequencies up to 40 kHz. The signal it produces is then amplified roughly 8,000 times before reaching your speakers.

A useful way to visualise this: imagine placing a supermarket carrier bag on top of Mount Everest, then magnifying the bag until it’s the size of the mountain. Any tiny crease, any minor imperfection in the bag is now reproduced at the scale of an entire geological feature.

That’s the amplification factor your tonearm operates inside. Any vibration, any flex, any unwanted movement the tonearm contributes gets magnified by the same 8,000 times the music does.

The cartridge should theoretically be able to produce a perfect transcription of the groove, but that is never the case. every unwanted vibration, whether that’s in the tube, the friction of the bearing or an unstable application of side bias produces vibration that interferes with the cartridge and the signal it is generating. This in turn results in smearing in the music you listen to.

Arm tubes as they vibrate and resonate, actually flex and move, which is bad news for the accurate tracking of a groove. Think about it this way:

The clock gauge on a fishing rod

In engineering we use a clock gauge, an instrument that measures distance in microns. Mounted on the most rigid mechanism it gives precise, repeatable readings. In contrast mounting that gauge on the end of a fishing rod the readings become meaningless, because the fishing rod is too flexible. The gauge is still accurate. The reference point isn’t stable, and heres the kicker: in the worst case scenario, if the rod flexes and the in opposition to where the guage needs to be, the reading is zero.

A stylus is a mechanical instrument. The tonearm holds it steady. If the arm flexes, twists, or vibrates while the stylus reads the groove, the cartridge can’t tell which movements came from the record and which came from the arm. The signal is contaminated before it ever leaves the cartridge.

This is why rigidity is the first principle of tonearm design. When the stylus hits a sharp transient like the leading edge of a bass note, that energy tries to push the whole arm backwards. If the arm flexes even slightly, energy that should have become signal becomes flex, and you lose dynamics. Bass disappears first.

Resonance: the wrong measurement

Magazines often quote a tonearm’s resonant frequency, with an ideal around 10 Hz. The implication is that an arm with the “right” frequency is a good arm. This misses the more important measurement.

Every tonearm resonates. It’s a spectrum, but no material is genuinely rigid at this scale, not titanium, not carbon fibre, not the densest hardwood. The question isn’t whether your arm resonates. It’s how much it moves when it does.

Theoretically, an arm perfectly resonating would actually stay still at its ends – in perfect resonance, no matter what the frequency, the cartridge would remain still. Of course, this isn’t how things work in practice, but the important thing to note is that resonance itself isn’t the issue. what matters is how great the amplitude reaching the position of your cartridge is.

We’d rather have an arm that resonates at an “imperfect” frequency but moves only a tiny amount, than one with a textbook 10 Hz resonance that flexes by a larger amplitude. The frequency is what reviewers measure. The amplitude is what your cartridge actually has to cope with.

Where the energy goes

When the stylus excites the arm, vibration travels down the tube toward the bearings and the counterweight. Most of it hits the counterweight at the back, and because the counterweight is heavy, some of that energy reflects straight back up the tube into the cartridge. The cartridge is trying to hold itself steady to read the groove. A reflected wave through its mount fights that effort and smears the signal.

The conventional fix is a single solid weight on the rear stub. We do something different. On our high-end arms from Illustrious up, we not only use a hollow mass-effective rear sleeve, but our counterweights are built from multiple layers of dissimilar materials, designed to absorb rather than reflect. Our current design uses 22 separate components and took years to develop. Multi-layer counterweights are now appearing on competing arms, usually a sign that an approach is working.

The materials trade-off

There is no perfect tonearm material. Titanium is rigid but rings at higher frequencies, giving beautiful midrange and treble but weak bass. Soft cast aluminium, used in many entry-level arms, rolls off the top end and loses dynamics. Carbon fibre is genuinely good and currently fashionable, but treated as a single-material solution, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

That problem is this: rigidity and damping fight each other. You want the arm rigid enough that the stylus reads cleanly. You also want it to dissipate vibrational energy quickly, so reflections don’t return to the cartridge. Add too much damping, and you lose some frequencies while others travel through and reflect back at different times, creating a timing smear you can hear in the music.

After thirty-plus years of experimentation, our conclusion is that no single material does it all. Our current arms use combinations of multi-layer tube construction, specialist coatings, and internal damping, because each frequency band responds best to a different solution. There is no magic material, only careful trade-offs handled at every level of the structure.

What this means for your system

The cartridge is not where most of the audible difference in vinyl playback lives. The tonearm and turntable are. If you’re upgrading a system and your budget is finite, the tonearm is almost always where the next pound is best spent. It’s the unfashionable answer, but its the honest one.

Tonearm Ranges

For many years, Origin Live Tonearms have earned the highest praise from satisfied owners, and are acclaimed by editors and reviewers as the best they have ever heard.

VIEW HERE

The post Why Your Tonearm Matters More Than Your Cartridge: Tonearm Deep Dive Pt.1 appeared first on Origin Live.

10/10 for Gravity One Record Weight

Mark Baker — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 15:52:16 +0000

A Rare 10/10 from Paul Rigby for the Gravity One Record Weight

Origin Lives simple record weight gets the Audiophile Mans coveted top marks

In The Audiophile Man’s latest review, he revisits the Gravity One Record Weight. Not only is the review absolutely stellar, but what’s more, even the comments are full of praise for this easy upgrade for any deck. Rigby also highlights its effect on low-end decks as well as high-end ones! Watch the YouTube review below to hear Paul’s report.

“The Gravity One opened up the upper frequencies, it infused the soundstage with far more information…”

And it’s not just Paul who rates the Gravity One:

“This upgrade could be roughly compared to doubling the cost of any component in your stereo system.” 10 Audio, 2020

“With the Gravity One, there is an unmistakable cleaning up of the pounding lower frequencies, which sound punchier, tighter and extended deeper than normal.”
Hi-Fi Choice, February 2021

To find out more about this excellent product, and to order with our 30 day moneyback guarantee. Follow the link below

Gravity One Record Weight

The post 10/10 for Gravity One Record Weight appeared first on Origin Live.

How Good are Origin Live Tonearms?

David Baker — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 12:22:05 +0000

BLOG POST

How Good are Origin Live Tonearms?

Tonearms, Upgrades

If you find it hard to discern what to believe from the mass of information available on the web and Hi-Fi press it’s not surprising.

The following news provides some clues on the caliber of Origin Live arms.

It’s astounding that Germany’s largest Audio magazine recently recorded their highest score EVER for a turntable / arm / cartridge combination from L’Art du Son, a manufacturer who never advertises. Unlike the sometimes dubious reviews of certain magazines, it’s fair to say that this is an exceptionally genuine assessment of a clearly outstanding product.

The fact that this deck used the Origin Live Enterprise arm (in transcription reference form 10.5”) also reflects on just how good this arm is. The L’Art du Son designer Martina Schoener is probably one of the foremost networkers in the business, who knows reputations and has heard most arms on the market. Her selection of such a highly critical component was a very careful choice.

I’ve included a link to the review concerned where they rate this deck / arm / cartridge combination as the absolute best they’ve heard – period. In the context of reviews that go up to £100,000 this is surprising in itself as some magazines instruct their reviewers never to make such a pronouncement because it can offend owners of other brands and discourage advertisers. This makes the review all the more credible in my view.

Stig Bjorge, CEO of Lyra cartridges has ordered one of these deck combinations which again is a tremendous endorsement from a world leading designer who regularly hears the whole spectrum of what’s on offer.

Notably this deck was playing in two rooms at the worlds foremost High End show in Munich where around 500 brands were on show. A good number of visitors commented it was the best sound at the show. Remarkable in an arena where the competition could not be higher with many rooms playing systems well in excess of £500,000.

Audio magazine Germany 9/2015 review

Rating: 135 points which makes it “The Best Turntable ” Audio has ever reviewed in more than 35 years of their history – complete package of deck,
Enterprise TR arm and Lyra Atlas (80,000 Euros)

“Music like we’ve never heard coming from a turntable: incredibly dynamic, intimate and direct, yet with an ultimately fine resolution. One could fill pages with listening examples, but the superlatives would merely repeat: none of the records we were listening to had ever been heard like this before. And never before had our digital reference, the venerable Linn Klimax DSM, looked so pale by contrast: when even a Klimax can’t win a single trick, then digital won’t make it at all. Not only does the TR come closer to reality than previous turntables – with vinyl it creates a musical parallel universe”.

For those wondering about the difference between the L’Art du Son Enterprise TR and normal Enterprise they are as follows:

Enterprise TR Effective length is 255mm — OL Enterprise is 240mm & 309mm.

TR version earthing arrangement is not attached to the screened external cable as per OL arms. Instead each screen has a separate earth wire and the tube also has a separate earth wire. This allows for fine optimisation of earthing configurations for valve and solid state amps.

The post How Good are Origin Live Tonearms? appeared first on Origin Live.

Upgrading Turntables

David Baker — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 12:27:18 +0000

BLOG POST

Upgrading Turntables

Turntable

Innovation You Can Employ in your deck

Innovation is often thought of, as those huge groundbreaking ideas that change the planet. Things like the wheel, the computer, telephone, aeroplane etc. However innovation must also include the countless micro-ideas that are needed to exploit the “big” idea.

For example there have been innumerable developments on the turntable since Thomas Edison first invented it back in 1877. You would be right in saying this is all very obvious but the point is that most innovation is slow and almost imperceptible in comparison to the “big idea”. The first computer was a huge innovation but it’s taken around 70 years to get fromTuring’s large room filled with valves to the far more powerful handheld devices now available.

The temptation is to imagine that a few great ideas will lead to an amazing product. The truth is that it’s much more a matter of getting a vast array of different aspects very right. I would suggest that most innovation is the refinement and evolution of existing ideas in a way that cannot be patented.

Development also takes time and is no less important than innovation. However because its less glamorous, it can tend to be neglected. If the difference between development and innovation is unclear then I would suggest an example. If we test 12 different solders to find out which one sounds the best, this is development. But say we introduce a material that no one has used before, this is innovation, because its a new idea.

Innovations you can use

At Origin Live we pay inordinate attention to the details of each turntable component. The advances made here have been so significant that we offer them as upgrades for most decks in existence. Examples are:

The Award winning upgrade platter mat – A unique material to absorb record vibration better.
The upgrade belt – A special type of rubber with high grip and low stretch.
Platter glide turntable oil – Very low friction oil to reduce microscopic ?juddering? of bearings
The DC Motor kit – dramatically reduces motor vibration.
Damping feet – Absorbs vibration and prevents reflections.

These work effectively on virtually all turntables, regardless of their brand and price. You can read the client and magazine reviews on our web site. However its worth noting that these products are all spin offs from years of design work carried out on our own turntables.

The post Upgrading Turntables appeared first on Origin Live.

Why Use an Upgrade Transformer

David Baker — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 15:44:11 +0000

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Why Use an Upgrade Transformer

Upgrades

A number of you have asked for advice on options for the motor kits. I am listing these below. To understand the logic behind these it’s helpful to briefly examine the function of the upgrade transformer.

The upgrade transformer is a great way to dramatically improve the performance of any dc motor kit. In fact, anyone who hears the comparison with the standard wall-wart, almost invariably orders one because the difference is so obvious.

Why? For dynamic performance, motors need to draw very high current for millisecond periods. Not only this but they need current instantaneously which means any resistance in the electrical path is going to reduce supply in much the same way as trying to get the entire Niagara Falls to flow through a relatively small pipe.

The upgrade transformer has a much lower impedance (resistance) than the standard wall-wart and is capable of nearly 20 times the current delivery. This goes some way to explaining why it is such an effective upgrade but there are other factors which are more subtle.

If you are considering ordering the motor kit then the following options hierarchy may help in apportioning your budget to best effect.

Option 1 = Advanced Motor Kit gives a brilliant upgrade at £345
Option 2 = Add the upgrade transformer at £180 to give a large further leap in performance.
Option 3 = Ultra Motor Kit instead of Advanced at £570 with upgrade transformer £180 = £750
Option 4 = Add DC200 motor instead of DC100 to option 3 which adds £132

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Is a Motor Upgrade Really Worth It?

David Baker — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 16:01:43 +0000

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Is a Motor Upgrade Really Worth It?

Upgrades

Continuing our series on upgrading your vinyl front end, we look today at the all important drive mechanism.

You may have observed a noticeable improvement in performance using our platter mats and special belts. These however, almost fade into insignificance compared to an Origin Live DC motor kit upgrade.

One of our clients described this so well on his £800 Avid Ingenium just last week. “OK so the kit set me back around 25% of the cost of my TT, arm & cartridge combined – so it needs to do something pretty special to justify that outlay. I mean a motor is a motor right? It just makes things go round at the right speed? Wrong!!”

“Was it all worth it? In a word Absolutely!! This DC conversion does exactly what the manufacturer claims it will. I now feel that my turntable is punching way above its weight. Sound-staging is improved, as is the ability to hear deep into the mix and around the instruments. It’s like the sounds have a shape & substance instead of just being.. ermm… a sound. Compared to my old AC motor, vibration is imperceptible, which I think must reap huge sonic benefits. My sample is also dead silent. Surface noise seems reduced too, though why this should be I don’t know. My overriding impression is that the motor is just getting out of the way & allowing
the rest of the kit to perform unfettered. Some so called upgrades are really just a bit tweaky, you almost have to convince yourself that you’ve made an improvement instead of just a change. No question of that here. It is flat out better and it is obvious.”

Turntable: Avid Ingenium, with Origin Live Silver MkIII tonearm, Ortofon Quintet Black fed through a Graham Slee Elevator/Reflex phono stage.
Dave G – London

This experience is the latest of many similar comments that can be read in magazine reviews and client reports on our web site. Notably they include owners of budget Rega to higher end Linn decks.

The kit fits 99% of all belt driven decks and because it delivers real results we offer it on a money back guarantee basis. This means if you run into any problems or decide it’s not for you, just return it for a full refund within 3 weeks of purchase.

Your turntable almost certainly uses a similar motor to the Avid. This assumption is drawn from the fact that decks such as Linn (till around 2010), Rega, Thorens, Systemdek, Ariston, etc, used an almost identical Philips AC synchronous motor. This same motor and similar, are still used today by an enormous number of decks.

The problem with 95% of all ac motors (especially the ones used on budget decks) is that they micro-vibrate and thus seriously disrupt the extraordinarily sensitive motion of the cartridge stylus. There are those who ridicule this idea, never realising that all vibration in a record deck is amplified an unimaginable 8000 times.

Some manufacturers reduce the effect of vibration by adding special power supplies to smooth the motor. These are effective to a limited extent but never overcome the real problem which is the motor itself. It’s not uncommon to find a £2000 supply feeding an £80 motor.

We have specialised in motors and power supplies for the best part of 20 years and developed a fabulously high performance solution which competes with supplies costing over £2500. Knowing that most owners of budget decks cannot countenance such an outlay has meant offering this at a mere £345 – a figure which avoids breaking the bank.

In addition to a low vibration dc motor and ultra precise voltage regulation, there are matters of pulley design and decoupling of the motor itself. The pulley we offer is precision bored (not reamed) to avoid the slightest oscillation. It’s also made from a carefully researched plastic that offers superior grip to metal and other plastics. The profile and dimensions are optimised to provide superb torque and minimum belt flutter.

The motor itself is mounted using a special decoupling material and rubber o-rings under the bolt heads. This kit is one of those items where great design trumps expenditure by a massive margin.

Dealers tell us that it’s laughable how this relatively small and innocuous kit outperforms massive motors with huge class A amplifiers driving them.

In our pursuit of ultimate turntable performance we have experimented with top brand Swiss DC motors utilising precision digital encoders at over £1000
for the encoder alone. These and other solutions have all fallen short of the performance we achieve on the Advanced dc motor kit. Yes it is that good!

Whether your deck is a Rega 3 or a Linn, Roksan, Oracle, VPI, Transrota, Avid, Sota etc you will experience a highly significant upgrade using this kit or your money back.

Many people ask us whether the kit will fit their particular deck? There are literally hundreds of turntable models on the market and owners have provided us with fitting guidance to cover a number of decks.

Lastly for owners of older DC motor kit it is worth mentioning that the regulator switch box underwent a significant improvement in circuit and components in December 2013 – You can upgrade older PCBs to latest specification.

The post Is a Motor Upgrade Really Worth It? appeared first on Origin Live.

Improving the Playing Surface of Your Vinyl Records

David Baker — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:30:55 +0000

BLOG POST

Improving the Playing Surface of Your Vinyl Records

Turntable, Review

Continuing our series on upgrading. Let’s consider how to upgrade the performance of the record itself. This may sound strange but your record performance can be significantly improved by the way you clean your records and in particular by using a better cleaning fluid. There are fluids recommended by record cleaning machine manufacturers that will clean out debris but do nothing for sound quality – not only this but they actually cause slight damage to your records.

To get a picture of why the surface of your record counts for a lot in terms of performance, take a quick look at the link below of an Olympic skier negotiating his way through a series of severe bumps at high speed. The type of wax used on the underside of skis in these Olympic events can make the difference between winning and losing. In the same way the performance of your cartridge is affected by the record surface itself.

In the past I’ve found cleaning records tedious and unrewarding in terms of any instant performance improvement on most records – OK there may be fewer cracks and pops but no really significant change in the sound unless the record was horrendously dirty. Cleaning records is not the most glamorous subject for this reason. That’s all changed for me since discovering the difference it makes to use a better cleaning machine with a properly formulated cleaning fluid. The advantages are:

Immediate performance increase even on brand new records

Protecting the longevity of your record collection

Massively increasing the life of the cartridge stylus by up to 3 times the norm

This is a subject that not many people are overly familiar with. Being aware of the issues involved, makes it easy to see the pros and cons of various record cleaning methods on the market. For example, are ultra-sonic machines the ultimate solution for cleaning? and if not, why not?

There is a lot to be covered so I’ve put together a video to outline little known facts on this important area.

Most of the information has been contributed by world leading experts in the field and this video has been produced with their approval.

Thanks go to Martina Schroder: 7 times winner of the Absolute Sound Magazine awards for her cleaning fluids. Martina has also lectured around the world on cleaning records not to mention her training in chemistry and work in record cleaning archives libraries.

Terry O’Sullivan: Director of Loricraft, has been building record cleaning machines for around 25 years. Unsurprisingly Terry has an incredible level of experience in this field. John Burns who imports Dynavector cartridges into the UK. John has also worked for Linn and is an expert on stylus care.

Please see video – CLEANING VINYL RECORDS THE WAY EXPERTS RECOMMEND

The post Improving the Playing Surface of Your Vinyl Records appeared first on Origin Live.

Why Is Analogue Sound From Turntables So Sensitive?

David Baker — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 17:00:30 +0000

BLOG POST

Why Is Analogue Sound From Turntables So Sensitive?

Turntables, Upgrades

Upgrading turntables – why are they so responsive to modification?

This is the first of a series of articles on upgrading turntables. It’s a bit late in coming out due to an urgent order for our new Voyager super deck. Super decks are a great platform to develop new knowledge because the budget allows one to stretch the boundaries – the Voyager has proven exceptionally fruitful in this respect. More of this in future as there is one very interesting spin off that’s relevant for all turntables.

When it comes to upgrading your deck, even the most seemingly insignificant items are worthy of consideration. I often receive emails from clients saying how they really did not expect much change by ordering an item. The flip side of this is the astonishment and delight expressed in finding the improvement to be extraordinary. This is of course a shameless plug, but the real point is that it perfectly illustrates how the composition of a turntable is severely underestimated.

A typical comment on the fitting of our upgrade belt to an old budget deck (Dual CS515) was. “Yes it runs beautifully Mark – a dramatic sound improvement” PETER O’BRIEN – South Africa

Before even starting on the numerous aspects that can improve your deck, I believe it’s important to understand why changes you make, have such a dramatic impact on the hidden world that lies behind turntable performance. Experimentation quickly convinces you by results, but I know from experience, that there is deep scepticism of some things being nothing more than snake oil. It’s easy to understand how changing a cartridge makes a difference but not so easy to understand how changing to a better belt at £29 can make even more difference than upgrading to the next cartridge model.

Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions about record player performance is that it’s related to isolation from vibration in the room. This is a natural conclusion. You can feel bass notes hit you. If you touch a sideboard with music playing you feel vibration with your fingers. It often comes as a surprise to learn that these things may only represent as little as 15% of the vibration influencing a deck. There are other sources which are far more influential. Environmental room vibration is generally very low frequency stuff whilst these other sources emit vibration that affects everything.

This important truth is very easy to prove conclusively. Simply disconnect your speakers and listen to your record player through headphones. Next transfer the deck from one surface to another e.g your equipment rack to the floor and listen again. You should notice a substantial difference. This difference obviously has nothing to do with isolation from the environment because the environment is virtually silent so why is it occurring?

The main sources of vibration, in order of importance are

The cartridge needle itself as it tracks the record – this sends vibration into the record and the tonearm.
The Motor which feeds vibration into the belt and the structure it’s mounted on.
The platter bearing – any friction here translates into vibration

The vibration from these sources is so small that it’s easy to dismiss them as being incapable of exerting serious influence. The truth is that a turntable is highly sensitive to these truly incredible levels of small vibration which we will look at later. Firstly, the important thing to consider is that any vibration has a ripple effect similar to explosive shock through an entire structure. Shock waves are extremely powerful – in water, they sink battleships – which is one reason why isolating a tonearm on a bed of silicon fluid is questionable.

When you play a record on a turntable, shock waves are occurring continuously at a microscopic level. These waves are transmitted at different speeds depending on their frequency and the material concerned. Some are reflected, some induce resonance into the structure, some are absorbed by friction, and some are transmitted into adjoining items. For the purposes of this article we will lump all this together under the term “micro-vibration” which as you may guess is an extremely complex phenomenon.

Micro-vibration in audio is incredibly quick and the effects are magnified beyond comprehension. One of the best illustrations of this is the human ear which stretches the bounds of credibility. On our website we quote a source which states “At the threshold of hearing the eardrum moves one tenth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom”. Let’s just pause at this point because it’s not easy to comprehend this sort of dimension. A physicist recently emailed me questioning this fact and asking for my sources – He asked “do you know how small a hydrogen atom is?”

Although he liked our products he suggested we remove this quote from our web site as it was ridiculous and would bring our credibility into question. We exchanged a few friendly emails in which I showed the maths behind the claim to be solid textbook stuff – See at very bottom of page for the equations if desired.

Let’s take a closer look at what it represents. The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 1.1 Å. For those of you unfamiliar with Angstroms (Å), one Angstrom is equivalent to 10^-7 mm. In other words if you lined up a row of hydrogen atoms next to one another, you would have 10,000,000 of them in the space of 1mm. An average human hair is approx 0.001mm so 10,000 hydrogen atoms would span it’s width. You can see from this that your eardrum is unbelievably sensitive to amplify such small movement and convert it into electrical impulses. In much the same way your cartridge senses almost immeasurably small movement and converts it into an electrical signal, which is then massively amplified. An estimate for the threshold of audible movement on a stylus needle is going to be almost infinitesimally small because the movement is analogue.

It never ceases to amaze me what is audible in turntable design – we’ve found that even the difference between using 5mm or 6mm bolt at the same tension is clearly audible using the same material etc. In summary, all you need to know is that you will hear the differences if you have a half decent system.

We believe playing vinyl is much more than dragging a piece of coal through a vinyl groove. Part of my background in designing Mine-sweeper ships to withstand explosive shock has given me a great respect for the intricacies of design for shock and vibration which is even more complex in record players. We research this endlessly so you don’t have to.

The post Why Is Analogue Sound From Turntables So Sensitive? appeared first on Origin Live.

When Should You Modify Your Deck or Get a New One?

David Baker — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:30:15 +0000

BLOG POST

Turntables: Modify or Trade-In

Turntables, Tonearms, Upgrades

Modify or Trade-in?

This is probably one of the most common questions we get asked. Modifying your turntable or tonearm is a sensible option if you want a significant improvement in sound quality and are restrained by budget. It’s also a preferred option if you’ve grown attached to your equipment.

We will look at the modification approach next week. On the other hand, there are limits to how far you can take an older deck. Things have advanced massively in some quarters and once you get to investing around £1500, it’s better to carefully select a better deck rather modify older designs. On this path, there are many competent designs but only a small handful of manufacturers who really shine in demonstration. A letter we had last week illustrates the gains of a typical turntable change.

“Many thanks for the recently arrived Calypso and Illustrious. This is a shockingly good combination which is dramatically superior to my previous deck, a Linn LP12/Ittok. The Calypso/Illustrious has huge authority and solidity in the stereo image which is substantially deeper and wider than anything I have heard before. Complex orchestral passages widen out to reveal individual instrument timbres and their location in the sound scape. The dynamic range is also vastly superior and capable of both power and subtlety. Most importantly the whole experience is very musically engaging. All of this is with a week old deck and a £100 cartridge, which only confirms Origin Live’s design philosophy of the importance of the turntable and arm. I can’t praise this combination highly enough. Anyone wanting a taste of musical paradise at an extremely reasonable price should seriously consider Origin Live. It’s difficult to imagine a better musical experience than this.”

Liam – County Kildare – Ireland

We know from dealers and clients, that no matter how up to date Liam’s Linn could be – in other words, highest specification, latest LP12 and Ekos 2, this result would be the same. We’ve had hardened ex-Linn dealers who’ve been in total unbelief about this. To prove us wrong they’ve put it to the test, only to be shocked by the results and having to call their friends around to confirm what they’re hearing.

I would lastly add, to put things in perspective, that the Linn is still a great deck and surpasses many on the market today. As said previously, there are only a relatively small number of manufacturers where you can do much better.

Hope this helps

The post When Should You Modify Your Deck or Get a New One? appeared first on Origin Live.