Listening

THIS ISSUE: A belt-drive turntable with a skeletal plinth, an acrylic platter, and an apparently lowish-torque DC motor. From Serbia.

- Art Dudley

From Serbia with Love

Sometimes I feign interest in living in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and ’60s. This happens mostly when I’m shopping for toothpaste at my local supermarket, where the toothpaste aisle is as long as a football field. “I don’t want so many choices,” I say in my Abe Simpson voice, “because all these choices are stupid. I wish I lived in the USSR: Shopping for toothpaste wouldn’t take so long.” But I’m only kidding.

Now I see dozens of high-end audio manufacturers popping up every year, with new turntable companies leading the charge. Virtually all of them offer at least a half-dozen different turntables, and sometimes the various models in a given company’s line represent a variety of different design philosophies: You want highmass, we got high-mass. You want low-mass, we got low-mass. Whatever you want, we got it. Those companies act as if they’re in the toothpaste business: They offer a bazillion different choices, just so they can occupy more shelf space or catalog pages than their competitors— and their competitors will always be more than happy to up the game and demand even more space on those shelves and pages.