A Cause for Celebration: Nagra's Reference Anniversary Turntable
o celebrate its 70th anniversary, Swiss audio-electronics manufacturer Nagra will offer only 70 of its new Reference Anniversary turntables ($175,000), a package that includes the turntable, tonearm, and power supply, all designed to work together, along with in-home setup and calibration. The product of four years of design and development, the Reference Anniversary is packed with significant technology, much of it aimed at ensuring absolute speed stability and isolation of the record from resonance and vibration. The Reference Anniversary features a chassis-and-subchassis configuration that uses plates of aircraft-grade aluminum and phenolic to "[prevent]" sound coloration from the system’s mechanical parts." The pillars of turntable's floating suspension employ both a spring mechanism and a highly viscous fluid, which, when combined, provide suspension and displacement in three dimensions. According to Nagra, "This innovative system provides unparalleled resistance to both self-generated and room/airborne vibrations and resonances." Nagra's own measurements confirm a self-resonance of the suspended chassis that's below 3Hz. The Reference Anniversary's IV – LXX caliber LP drive, whose workings are visible, uses a hybrid approach that takes advantage of the best ideas from direct- and belt-drive systems. It uses two high-precision, Swiss-made, decoupled, brushless DC motors and a belt inspired by Nagra's IV-S tape deck. To maintain proper speed, the drive system uses an accelerometer to monitor the floating chassis to ensure that it is absolutely stable. speed calibration is done over a 20-second window, when the platter’s speed is set for actual playback (stylus in groove). During this cycle, the platter’s speed is compared with a high-precision quartz reference and any deviation from this reference is corrected. For listening, no active speed control is employed and the motors are running in a closed-loop mode, to provent the cogging of some similar drive systems. A Nagra Modulometer on the turntable’s front makes calibration (and pitch control) simple. The entire LP drive system weighs 11.2 kg/24.6 lbs. The Reference Anniversary's Exium AM platter adds another 6.5 kg/14.3 lbs. The Reference Anniversary's 10 1/2" tonearm has only eight parts. It uses an armwand fashioned from dual-concentric carbon-fiber tubes and an intermediary layer of wood to provide "an ultra rigid, extremely low resonance platform for both the cartridge connection and bearing mounting." The tonearm’s bearing is a CNC-machined, hardened-steel cone seated in a resonance-isolating, silicone-damped polyethylene cup. The tonearm’s counterweight is supplemented by a low-hung, saddle-shaped weight that provides stability while minimizing the tonearm’s effective mass. An oversized, high-precision, rotary collar allows smooth, fine adjustment of VTA on the fly. The Reference Anniversary's power supply benefits from
the R&D for the external power supplies of Nagra's HD Preamp and HD DAC X. It is
supercapacitor-based and, according to Nagra, provides "all of the advantages of
battery-based power supplies with the added advantage of accepting and delivering charges
much faster and with higher current load and cycle stability than battery-based power
supplies." The motor drive system also uses multiple supercapacitors. |
