This “hobby” of mine does provide many scratch-my-head moments. The Onedof room was one of those moments.
Undeniably, the Onedof turntable, short for “One Degree of Freedom”, is very pretty. According to the literature, it’s “a revolutionary belt driven turntable designed by NASA-award winning aerospace engineer Aleks Bakman. The result is pristine, unspoiled sound.” Continuing:
The turntable features:
- The first turntable in history with self-centering platter bearing in a non-resonant liquid suspension. The platter spindle instability, a never before addressed cause of acoustic distortion, is eliminated.
- The noise canceling drive with on-the-fly vertical motor position adjustment. This adjustment eliminates distortions related to the vertical drive belt position. The drive is based on a Texas Instruments’ microprocessor; it is a product of most advanced Swiss craftsmanship and innovative American engineering.
- Synchronous motor with coreless skewed winding that eliminates cogging and provides torque ripple free operation.
- 50 lb aluminum high quality alloy platter with internal liquid damping.
- Tonearm tower with continuous, smooth yet solid on-the-fly Vertical Tracking Angle adjustment of over three inches.
- Enough space to accommodate three tonearms.
You can read that from their website, too. And a whole lot more about the bearing, the suspension, the dampening, and the drive.
Made in the USA.
The price? $150k. Sorry, in case you missed that, let me repeat it. The cost of the turntable, alone, is $150,000 US.
The $5k tonearm Triplanar Ultimate and the $5k Benz Micro LP cartridge are extra. Of course.
The table was shown with an $18.5k Aesthetix Io Eclipse phono stage, $45k D’Agostino Momentum monoblock amplifiers, connecting via $20k Transparent Reference MM speaker cables to $45k Sonus Faber Stradivari Homage loudspeakers.
This, clearly, was the room to rob.
I sat there that morning, in the warm Denver sunlight, listening to $300k worth of audio gear and wire and marveled at exactly how much cash I’d have to actually have lying about doing nothing useful before the notion of parting with $300k on this system would not only make sense, but be “worth it”. Just as a quick comparison, $300k would buy a fully updated 3000+ sq foot home on 11 acres just outside of Denver. I know this because as I sat there, amazed, I pulled out my iPhone, went online to Realtor.com, and checked. Yup. That’s serious residential real estate kind of money.
Don’t get me wrong. The gear was awesome. The room, on the other hand, was not. Without a shred of room treatments anywhere to be seen, I suppose I wasn’t surprised that the sound in the room wasn’t as ideal as I’d have hoped. However, that fact did nothing to tarnish the shine of pure lust and power as it glinted there with it’s golden, fatal allure. No, not one bit.
I spent the rest of the morning, wandering around room by room, muttering under my breath: “Precious. My precioussss. My own.”
As usual, no one seemed to get the joke. [sigh] I need to get out more.
