Turntables are supposed to hiss and hum a little. It’s part of the deal. Esoteric’s new T-01 breaks that deal by swapping its belt for a magnetic field, leaving the platter to spin in near-total mechanical silence.
The Japanese audio maker calls the system MagneDrive, and the T-01 is its second act. The idea first showed up four years ago on the Grandioso T1, a flagship model priced around US$86,000, which was less a turntable than a proof of concept with a hefty price tag attached. The T-01 simplifies that original design and its installation and comes with a tonearm included at $50,000 in the US or €48,000 in Europe, still comfortably in exotic hi-fi territory. Buyers who already own a tonearm they love can opt for the bare T-01AL instead, at $46,000.
Esoteric’s pitch for that price is ambitious: a vinyl playback experience so clean it’s indistinguishable from the studio master tape or from a high-resolution digital file. The goal is “to create a musical experience in which listeners feel as though they are experiencing the actual performance, whether they are listening to an analog record or a high-resolution digital source, without being conscious of the difference in sound quality caused by the medium,” Esoteric brand manager Hiroyuki Machida tells me by email.
Esoteric
Inside the T-01, the motor is topped with a dome-shaped rotor, ringed with alternating magnetic poles. The platter, machined from non-magnetic aluminum, carries a ring of soft iron on its underside, a metal that magnetizes instantly but forgets it the moment the field moves on. Spin the rotor, and its shifting field reaches up and drags that iron ring along with it, and the whole platter along with that, without motor and platter ever touching.
“A cartridge acts as an extremely sensitive sensor,” says Machida. “The signal it picks up is amplified at a very high gain before reaching the listener’s ears. Therefore, even at faint levels, if the rumble generated by the drive motor blends into the musical signal, it reduces the resolution of record playback. Strip that rumble out, and the result is a sound that is incredibly open and emotional.”
Esoteric couldn’t resist adding a second magnetic trick. A system called MagneFloat uses neodymium magnets – the same strong, everyday magnets found in headphones and hard drives – to take some of the weight off the platter’s central spindle bearing. Full magnetic levitation, maglev-train style, was technically on the table.
Esoteric
“Since the MagneFloat magnets we use are powerful neodymium magnets, 100% magnetic levitation was technically possible,” Machida explains. “However, in a turntable, it is crucial to maintain the geometry of the three points, the tonearm pivot, the spindle, and the stylus, in order to accurately reproduce the music source. With 100% magnetic levitation, the geometry of the spindle relative to these three points could become unstable.”
The platter weighs 13 kg (about 29 lb), and MagneFloat trims its effective load on the spindle down to 5.5 kg (about 12 lb), up slightly from the 4 kg (about 9 lb) setting used on the original Grandioso T1. “Increasing the platter’s floating magnetic force and reducing the load on the spindle creates a more open sound, but the sound also tends to become slightly lighter,” Machida notes.
The motor itself runs on a smooth three-phase sine wave current instead of a blunt pulsed signal. With the old approach, Machida says, “the rotor inside the motor rotates in a tick-tock manner, like a quartz watch,” while the sine wave drive lets it “rotate smoothly, like a mechanical watch,” cutting down on what engineers call cogging.
Esoteric
Getting that waveform precise enough required a BNC input for an external 10 MHz master clock, borrowed straight from recording-studio gear. With it, explains Machida, “the sound became more precisely focused, and the soundstage expanded.”
The whole assembly, separate power supply included, weighs about 42 kg (roughly 93 lb), with the turntable housed in an aluminum-and-wood chassis. “Combining aluminum, which produces a natural tone, with wood, which is rich in mid-to-low frequencies, results in neutral sound quality with solid mid-to-low frequencies, reminiscent of a master tape,” says Machida.
As for where the money actually goes, Esoteric’s brand manager insists it isn’t R&D. “Thanks to the great success of our first model, the Grandioso T1, we have recouped the development costs for obtaining the patent.” Instead, he points to labor. “Most of the cost comes from the finishing processes, such as machining the platter and chassis and applying the piano finish to the mid-chassis,” work he calls significant handwork.
Whether all that engineering translates into audibly better sound is still, for now, Esoteric’s claim to make. The T-01 is expected to leave the factory and reach buyers around late September to early October, letting the world’s audiophiles find out for themselves, provided they’ve made peace with the price tag first.
Source: Esoteric
