My DIY Turntable
My New Table
As detailed below, I built a turntable some years ago. Since then, my woodworking skills have greatly improved. More importantly, from an audio point of view, I've acquired a really good mono cartridge, the better to listen to all those great mono recordings from the 1950s and early 1960s. I had purchased an extra armtube for the Graham 2.2, so as to switch cartridges without all the work, but that turned out to be more trouble than expected. What would really make switching painless would be a turntable with two tonearms.
So, I set out to build such a thing, and you can see the result in the photos. It is, in many ways, similar to the earlier one. The basic idea is similar: A core of MDF, wrapped by bubinga. The top is even made from the very same piece of wood from which the top of the first one was made. (I'd saved it, all these years.) But there are some differences. The core is thicker: Going from the bottom, it's one layer of MDF, then a layer of sand (I hollowed out some MDF to hold it), then a thin piece of cement backer board (used for tiling), then four more layers of MDF.
The motor, again as with the first one, is a DC motor from Origin Live. The platter is from VPI, the 2" thick aluminum version sold as an upgrade for the Classic and some other tables. It has an inverted bearing and is less heavy than the one I'd used before.
The armboards in the photos are temporary, the one on the right being African teak; the other is just pine. I have an Origin Live Conqueror arm on order, and the real armboards will be built when I have it.
Total cost was again about $2200, the same as the previous one. Which makes it a great deal, because it sounds fantastic!
The Old One
In the summer of 2010, I decided to build myself a turntable. My inspiration was the home-brewed table I'd seen and heard at the home of Robert May, my friend and frequent collaborator, who has one of the finest stereo systems I have ever heard. Robert's table (as it was then) was very different from this one, but mine is based on the same sort of principle: lots of mass, and good parts.
I actually haven't weighed the table, so I don't know quite how much it ended up weighing, but I've carried it around enough to know that it weighs a fair bit.
What you see of the base is constructed from Bubinga, which comes from the Guibourtia tree, an evergreen native to Africa and South America. Bubinga is often used in musical instruments and so seems a nice choice for a turntable. It's also nice that Guibourtia trees can be very large, so Bubinga comes in quite wide planks. I bought a piece 21" wide at my local lumber yard and had them plane it for me. They had to rip it to 19" to get it through their planer, but that was plenty wide enough to give me a solid piece for the top. As you can see in the pictures, the grain is really gorgeous.
The table is completely solid. The interior consists of four slabs of 3/4" MDF, glued together, with holes cut, of course, for the motor, bearing, and arm mounting. The Bubinga then forms a kind of shell around the MDF. I originally tried to mitre everything, to get nice square corners, but they weren't as square as I wanted, so I reconsidered and cut the corner pieces from scraps. I think they add quite a bit of visual interest to the table. The edges of the top were then finished with a router. If you look at the pictures, you can see where a piece broke off during routing on the left front edge. Bubinga tends to be full of gum holes and such, so this is a risk. In the end, though, I find the odd edge again adds yet more visual interest to the piece. (It probably breaks up resonances, too. ;-) )
The table is finished with a natural stain and a few coats of polyurethane.
The feet are old TipToes that I bought years ago for my VPI HW-19 Mk IV. The table then sits on a 1.5" slab of granite, which itself sits on what's left of an old Arcici Lead Balloon turntable stand.
I built the table so it would have interchangable armboards, much the way VPI's turntables do. There's a good-sized hole cut beneath where the armboard mounts, so as to accomodate different tonearms (should I change mine). Getting this to work properly was the hardest thing about building the table. I couldn't locate the mounting holes until after the table was assembled, but then drilling holes in the correct places in the armboard itself proved quite tricky. One nice aspect of this construction, though, is that the armboard can be made from a contrasting material. I made the original one from Poplar, mostly because it is cheap and, as I just said, I knew I was going to have problems. The current armboard, though, is made from Purpleheart, which is a gorgeous wood that is just a little bit purpler than the Bubinga itself and is plenty solid enough for this application.
As for the business parts, the platter and bearing are from a VPI TNT IV. The motor is the Origin Live DC motor, with the ultra controller, DC 200 motor, and upgraded transformer. (Not much more you can do to that.) For the belt, I'm currently using a piece of black string but am meaning to try some fishing line, too.
Tying the string so that it was the right length also proved to be a challenge. A little bit loose, and the table will not get up to speed; a little tight, and it puts too much pressure on the motor, which complains noisily. I eventually thought to take a scrap piece of wood, drive a nail at one end and then drive another at half the length I thought I wanted, and at various 1/4" increments around that length. Then it was easy to tie "belts" at different lengths with some repeatable accuracy.
Total cost was about $2200: About $1300 for the motor; $750 for the platter and bearing (used); and $150 for lumber and milling. Plus several days of work. Of course, that doesn't include the tonearm, which is a Graham 2.2, at least at the moment.
How does it sound? Absolutely fantastic, and miles beyond what it replaced, which was an absolutely maxed-out VPI HW-19 with Mk IV Platter and bearing, Stand-alone Motor Assembly (SAMA), and Synchonous Drive System (SDS). Much of this is probably due to the DC motor, but I'd like to think the massive base (my contribution!) contributes something.
