How does the world’s first “levitating turntable” actually work?
 

How does the world’s first “levitating turntable” actually work?

https://maglevaudio.com/

Anybody know anything about this table?

No, but they sure are cool to look at in action.

Physics.

Fair bit of $$ for a TT that can be used only with MM cartridges. Not necessarily a bad thing, as there are some excellent MMs these days.

Word is they recently declared bankruptcy. Anyways, it was an absolutely terrible concept for actual vinyl playback. All that trouble just to make the world's most wobbly platter. It couldn't even safely play with MC cartridges due to magnet interaction.

Yeah, when I saw videos of it playing, the platter was really wobbly. Looked to be an absolute disaster of a design.

This can be the problem when "entrepreneurs" fall in love with their own ideas and nothing, not even a solid understanding of you know, engineering and physics, can get them off of it. Imagine the amount of money that went into this project both from a design, development, and then transfer to Ops (aka Manufacturing) that all went down the toilet.

I wonder if they did any Capability Analysis before committing the prototype to Ops. This is exactly what Six Sigma is for...:d'oh:

Physics doesn't care about your...feelings.

First? Decades ago, I had a Stanton turntable with a mag-lev platter which worked exactly as it was designed to...........................poorly.

Exactly. The platter is suspended by magnetic force from below balancing the downward gravitational force due to its mass. In total isolation, this is stable.

OTOH, the observation of the wobbly platter indicates that there are other factors in play. One is that any vibration of the plinth which holds the magnetic force generator disturbs the somewhat resonant magnetic/gravitational balance and the platter wobbles with respect to the plinth.

Unfortunately, the tone arm is fixed to the plinth and not to the platter. As with my late Stanton turntable, the result is a constantly varying VTA. It is a wrong-headed design.

If someone has more info on this, I'd be happy to hear it.

Needs superconducting magnets. Of course, operating at 100 Kelvin presents other problems.