General Asylum

Posted by Stephæn (B) on October 11, 2004 at 10:46:37

One of the first places we visited Friday morning was Kevin Haskin’s DIYCable room, chock full of goodies for the well, you know, the DIY crowd (more on that later).

The first thing that caught my eye also took me so off-guard that I failed to snap a picture in time to document the event. It was a record (no real surprise there), and it was spinning (duh!), BUT it was so seriously warped (think scalloped) that I immediately began asking around for some Dramamine.

Were my eyes closed, however, my ears would not have noticed anything amiss. What kind of table/arm/cart combo does it take to track this kinda’ torture? Here are my notes, transcribed from a chat with the designer.

So, whatcha’ got here?

“I’m introducing a new turntable using my Well Tempered principles, and the name of this model is the Well Tempered Amadeus. And it’s going to be a package with the table, the arm, a Grado cartridge and a phono stage for under a thousand. I’m going to make it as far under a thousand as I can get. It has revolutionary levels of performance. You know, I’ve stared at that flutter meter literally hundreds of hours improving the bearing, improving the damping, improving the motor drive, improving the belt … I’m tired!”

I gotta’ ask about the, you know, about the …

“The golf ball is a result of me sitting there drinking coffee one morning when an idea leaped into my head about the bearing. I play golf and I thought … you know, ah… a golf ball and a bearing and some silicon damping fluid … within three hours I had one made. I listened and said, ya’ know what? This is it. I’ve made several iterations of it, but the golf ball … well, perhaps you know … golf balls are very precisely made, and comparatively speaking, they’re cheap! You can buy them at the swap meet for 25 cents. If you were to try to machine a perfect sphere like that, you know, we’re not talking 25 cents. Furthermore, this one has … I have a smiley on this ball … somebody marked this with a smiley and I included that … there’s no extra charge.”

After some chatter about the possibilities of tweaking with cryoed Titleists and other brands of balls, we manage to move on. What’s with the platter?

“It’s MDF … I experimented with lots of different materials for the platter. This is the highest grade of MDF and it works so good I’m afraid to do anything to it … you know, paint it, finish it … put a surface on the top or the bottom. No, I think we better just leave that right alone. I don’t have a fingerlift for the arm, although you can have one if you wish, because the fingerlift is just something else to cause trouble. So I just lift it up like this.

Yea, that’s how I do mine (the Space Arm on my Space Deck is ah ... rather ... uhm ... Spartan, too).

“Uh-huh. And, don’t tell anybody, but you know what kind of mat that is right there? It makes an excellent shelf-liner … that stuff that goes in the bottom of your kitchen drawers, It makes a fabulous mat.”

Price?

“Turntable, arm, cartridge … phono stage to which you are now listening … under a thousand. I’m going to make it as far under a thousand as I can. I don’t have a good handle about manufacturing costs yet, but … we’re gonna’ make it happen.

Thanks, Bill.

“Bill Firebaugh, Bill the Fireball of Well Tempered Labs.”

Bill is indeed a fireball, and even more refreshing, I got no sense of him giving me a typical sales pitch. To hear him talk, you’d think he was a kid who just built his first table. His enthusiasm and sincerity makes him one of those people you just want to be around.

Note: Bill Firebaugh started designing the Well Tempered Arm during the mid 1980's in his spare time. Bill was a key member of the Ford Aerospace think tank, so finding unique solutions to complicated problems was nothing new to him.
(http://www.welltemperedlab.com/designtech.html)


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