If Apple Designed a Turntable, This Is Probably What It Would Look Like

[Najon]

Digital output?

If you get the Urika II, it has.

 

[flexwithmarius]

"There's a substantial percentage of our work which we do purely for the love of doing it,"

HaHa, yeah alright.

I’d say it’s the 60k asking price.

You seem to have missed the pro-bono part.

Ive is obsessive over what he creates. That’s why he branched out into his own firm. Apple can’t offer him the creative leeway since they’re heavily commercial and mass market.

This player isn’t for the average record enthusiast, and that might irritate some people. It’s more so a symbol of passion and excellence, so gawking at the price tag is irrelevant.

 

[Depechetraff]

Looks an awful lot like a Music Hall Classic. At 1/100th of the price, I'd bet few could ever tell the difference in sound quality. I think the Music Hall actually looks better too.

I'd bet that most people could tell the difference. But I'd also bet that only a few would care about the difference...

 

[1madman1]

It looks like any other Linn LP12 - only with a white plinth.

 

[darngooddesign]

Why does a desktop computer need to be that thin?

Why does it have to be thicker than it needs to be?

Why can't Ethernet plug into the brick instead of the computer itself?

 

[twistedpixel8]

Dumb. Never pay more than 1-2k for a new turntable. I have a Rega P1 that is great. 300.

The two aren’t even in the same league. You’re comparing a Ford Fiesta with a Rolls Royce Phantom.

 

[andywaynebrooks]

This is what happens when rich people set the price.. I am sure that the 6 LoveFrom employees who buy this will enjoy it.

 

[darngooddesign]

You seem to have missed the pro-bono part.

Ive is obsessive over what he creates. That’s why he branched out into his own firm. Apple can’t offer him the creative leeway since they’re heavily commercial and mass market.

This player isn’t for the average record enthusiast, and that might irritate some people. It’s more so a symbol of passion and excellence, so gawking at the price tag is irrelevant.

Its debatable how much LoveFrom designed besides the hinges and round speed dial.

 

[StyxMaker]

 

[Velin]

Never understood the vinyl resurgence. The medium sucks ass.

Want good sound? Get some lossless files, such as FLAC, WAV, WMA, ALAC.

You just have to have media in your hands? Get some CDs, they sound great, instant forward/reverse, no physical needle constantly scratching and destroying grooves in a cheapo vinyl disc.

Spare me the nonsense about vinyl sounding "warmer" or "richer": it's background noise. This turntable makes about as much sense as a $25,000 tonearm. Laughable.

 

[ddhhddhh2]

I gotta tell my niece to ditch this dead-end marine biology research pronto, and get herself enrolled in design school.

 

[BigSmurf]

More than 50 years ago Bang & Olufsen made the iconic Beogram 4000,that one looks like someting Apple could have designed.

The Beogram is a gorgeous turntable. I believe that b&o recently reissued a limited run using overhauled old turntables.
It sounds great too.
Btw the LP12 is widely considered as being audibly better still.

 

[ThomasJL]

Ive forgot to add a notch.

 

[MrRom92]

It's interesting how people spend so much money to reproduce music from a piece of vinyl that is far from accurate to the master recording. Imagine not only $60K for the turntable, but what pre-amps and amps and speakers this is connected to. The total price tag is unreal. To play music from a piece of plastic.

In the interest of full disclosure, which original master recordings have you personally had access to at any point to make such a statement?
Vinyl - when done right - sounds amazingly close to the original master tape, closer than many commonly available alternatives. This is my personal viewpoint and I’m not alone in that, it’s a commonly held opinion by other audio engineers as well.
A 15 or 30IPS dub reigns supreme, but good luck getting one for any album you want to listen to. Vinyl’s the next best thing, yes, plastic it may be.


Of course, this $60K turntable is more of a collector’s piece and artistic statement. It still looks a lot like an LP12, and probably still sounds like one too. Plenty of those out there on the used market in the $1k-$2K range. And 15 years ago anyone selling them would be lucky to get that much. They’re not fantastic, you could do much better for less money.

 

[MrRom92]

Sorry, without pitch control, this is useless for me. I’ll stick with these Technics SL-1200Mk2s

You’re better off. Even ignoring pitch control, the Technics 1200 is much better designed and outspecs an LP12 in every way. Sadly it’s just too “ugly” and utilitarian looking for those who want a minimalist statement piece.

 

[MrRom92]

Ultimately, yes. But before that there was a device that did it. It basically sampled the music before and after a pop/click and averaged out and filled in the pop/click with that averaged sample.

The best “pop and click remover” at the end of the day is just not dropping your records, throwing them around without a care in the world or handling them with Doritos fingers

 

[MrRom92]

Not to forget that each time you play a record you are literally degrading it.

If the record is degrading with use then something very, very wrong is happening with your equipment.

 

[MrRom92]

I agree. I started buying cassettes in the 1970s as a teenager. Then I realized how poorly so many of them were recorded (tape hiss and muted high frequencies), so I switched to vinyl LPs, eventually owning over 400 of them. But the pops, ticks, and scratches always annoyed me, so I was thrilled when CDs came out. Yes, there have been plenty of poorly mastered CDs, but the good ones sound great. I never understood the argument that LPs sound "warmer." I have a fairly high-end sound system, which exposes the flaws of any recording, regardless of the medium. In the late 1990s, I sold my LPs and, over time, replaced the albums I liked with CDs, keeping only a few collector's items and LPs that were never released on CD. I long since ripped them to high-quality MP4A files. These days, I usually listen to new music on Apple Music, which sounds fine to my aging but still good ears.

I do get that some people like the physicality of LPs. The one thing I miss about them is the large-size cover art and reading the liner notes and lyrics. CDs often include those features, too, if on a smaller scale. It's the same for me with books. I was thrilled when e-books came out, because my wife and I had run out of space on our bookshelves. It quickly became apparent, though, that e-books are fine for novels, business books, and so on, but not for books that incorporate illustrations, custom fonts, or other elements designed to take advantage of print medium. But I won't claim that the words themselves are more "magical" in printed form versus electronic form.

The pops, ticks and scratches would annoy anyone, but of course one has to address how they’re getting there in the first place. Most people listening to vinyl these days don’t have that problem - I certainly don’t.
The modern audiophile is a bit more careful with their belongings nowadays that vinyl is a premium/collectible product; than the average person was back in the day when records were a mainstream consumer product.
It’s the reason why well cared for copies of classic albums command a premium, meanwhile the copies that Joe Sixpack left laying on the carpet or used as a frisbee end up in thrift stores or landfills.

 

[MrRom92]

I recently heard this line in a Bad Religion song: "Nostalgia is an excuse for stupidity." When I first heard that, it sort of pinged my psychology, and I started to reflect on my life. I was like, wait a minute... because I was literally listening to the LP at the time, and staring at my sea of CDs and vinyl records.

But he was right.

Living in the past is a form of self-harm. You're literally playing a psychological game with yourself, and you don't even know it. Things change. Actually, things improve. Cassette tapes improved on vinyl records, CDs improved on cassettes, iTunes improved on CDs and streaming improved on iTunes. Not wholly. There were flaws along the way. But overall, the improvements were empirical and what came next was better. And the same holds true for just about everything else, whether your psychology is able to see it or not. So this idea of Apple making a turntable... that's like Ford making the Model T again. It's ridiculous.

I would love to analyze the psychology behind this post. Nearly everything you named as an “improvement” is measurably worse than what you claim it “improved” upon.

 

[MrRom92]

Linn stuff is certainly good… but even if it did last 34 years, that’d still be almost $1,800/yr 🙄

Not sure anything is “that good.” This is a vanity product for the super-rich. Anyone claiming they can “hear” that quality difference enough to justify the price; I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.

Nobody’s saying that this sounds amazing in such a way that it justifies a $60K pricetag. That’s the problem. Anyone who knows hifi knows than an LP12 is an old fashioned and underperforming basic turntable design. It was relatively nice, 50 years ago.

 

[MrRom92]

Exactly, EQ is a must to recreate the original and composer intended source as close as you can. Everything in your setup influences the sound, and you hearing, which frequencies you can hear, depends of your age, health conditions etc... So if someone says that I don't need an equalizer or to modify my sound source, I know for sure that I have in front of me an ignorant.

A well mastered record on a properly balanced system will not need an EQ. An EQ introduces more way more sonic issues than it solves. You will not find ANY sort of graphic EQ or tone controls in the vast majority of high end stereo systems.

The $20K parametric EQs found in mastering studios are better in every measurable aspect, and the mastering engineers still prefer to remove them from the chain if at all possible.

 

[MrRom92]

Never understood the vinyl resurgence. The medium sucks ass.

Want good sound? Get some lossless files, such as FLAC, WAV, WMA, ALAC.

You just have to have media in your hands? Get some CDs, they sound great, instant forward/reverse, no physical needle constantly scratching and destroying grooves in a cheapo vinyl disc.

Spare me the nonsense about vinyl sounding "warmer" or "richer": it's background noise. This turntable makes about as much sense as a $25,000 tonearm. Laughable.

Ahhh. Clearly an educated person speaking from real-world experience! How could I not have realized that all this time I thought I was listening to music, there was actually “constant scratching and destroying grooves”? Silly me!


What is this mythical CD that sounds better than the equivalent record produced from the same master tape? Can you name one? I want to hear it.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

The $20K parametric EQs found in mastering studios are better in every measurable aspect, and the mastering engineers still prefer to remove them from the chain if at all possible.

It’s funny, I got to help out as a studio tech on & off in my twenties. It actually made me give up on the arms race of hi fidelity home stereos. Seeing the (many) tens of thousands of dollars that a good pair of Analog-Digital converters cost, the cost of calibrating everything, the mad science of all the compression, etc etc etc, made me realize that there is no way to spend my way to a more faithful reproduction of the original sound, bc the “original sound” never existed to begin with. Recordings are impressionist paintings, not photographs. The best I was ever going to get off a CD or digital tape recording was whatever tweaks I decided sounded *pretty good* on whatever i had to play it back on at any given time.

However, as I get older, I find that as I have less time & patience for listening to music, the moments that i do spend doing that I want to fully enjoy the experience. Streaming music is such a commodification of music, I dont even know who I’m listening to before something else comes on. It’s background noise. With CD’s & DVD’s, the artwork is so small I’m not compelled to spend more than a few seconds looking at it. Beyond that, it doesn’t demand anything from me. Even loading is just an annoyance, & I’d prefer to leave CD’s in a multi-disc carousel like they made for that reason, where they become just like streaming. & sure enough, I can walk away from it and tune it out bc I know it’ll always be exactly the same the next time I play it. Without physical wear, there is nothing special or unique about the each listen. A record album has an ephemeral quality to the medium that makes each listen a little bit precious, something you don't want to ignore or take for granted. It makes you interact with it every 23 minutes. It just demands the attention and tactile interaction in an immediate and personal way that no other medium does. Unlike the forgettable background ‘services’, if I put a record on, immersing myself in the large artwork and listening IS the thing that I’m doing. So I find that experience makes it worth a nice turntable.

 

[svish]

Good to see the product. But $60000 is insanely high.

 

[doelcm82]

It’s funny, I got to help out as a studio tech on & off in my twenties. It actually made me give up on the arms race of hi fidelity home stereos. Seeing the (many) tens of thousands of dollars that a good pair of Analog-Digital converters cost, the cost of calibrating everything, the mad science of all the compression, etc etc etc, made me realize that there is no way to spend my way to a more faithful reproduction of the original sound, bc the “original sound” never existed to begin with. Recordings are impressionist paintings, not photographs. The best I was ever going to get off a CD or digital tape recording was whatever tweaks I decided sounded *pretty good* on whatever i had to play it back on at any given time.

However, as I get older, I find that as I have less time & patience for listening to music, the moments that i do spend doing that I want to fully enjoy the experience. Streaming music is such a commodification of music, I dont even know who I’m listening to before something else comes on. It’s background noise. With CD’s & DVD’s, the artwork is so small I’m not compelled to spend more than a few seconds looking at it. Beyond that, it doesn’t demand anything from me. Even loading is just an annoyance, & I’d prefer to leave CD’s in a multi-disc carousel like they made for that reason, where they become just like streaming. & sure enough, I can walk away from it and tune it out bc I know it’ll always be exactly the same the next time I play it. Without physical wear, there is nothing special or unique about the each listen. A record album has an ephemeral quality to the medium that makes each listen a little bit precious, something you don't want to ignore or take for granted. It makes you interact with it every 23 minutes. It just demands the attention and tactile interaction in an immediate and personal way that no other medium does. Unlike the forgettable background ‘services’, if I put a record on, immersing myself in the large artwork and listening IS the thing that I’m doing. So I find that experience makes it worth a nice turntable.

"Hey Siri, What's the name of this song?"

I think we've finally found a killer app for the Apple Vision Pro. You'll be able to sit on your couch with virtual turntable on the table in front of you. Next to is a stack of Albums from your library. Choose an album and lay it on the turntable. Then gently drop the needle and hear your album in glorious spacial audio. While you listen, enjoy the intricate artwork and novel-length text from the album cover. Reach up and turn the scroll wheel on your headset and you'll find yourself inside the album's artwork. Or onstage with the artist.