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How do you choose a turntable ? 

Looks ? Reviews ? Brand reputation ? Price ? Actually listening to it ?

We hope you’re able to go by the last one, but even if you do, wouldn’t it be good to have some hard facts to help you out ?

Is that  some  wavering that I’m hearing ? Maybe I need a Shaknspin…  

And by the way, there’s a new more accurate version – the Two !

Buy it

Measure

Using a sophisticated 9 degrees-of-freedom sensor, Shaknspin can accurately measure the rotational speed of your turntable platter, 500 times per second.

The new version 2 improves on that by always performing an automatic calibration at the start of each measuring session. The calibration uses a fast reacting IR sensor and a marker to make sure that 33.33 is indeed 33.33

You can see the whole calibration process here.

The Speed option allows the platter speed to be continuously displayed allowing you to confirm that all is well.

Analyze

Wow&Flutter analysis is another method of operation. Following a brief measuring period, the following indicators are calculated and displayed:

  • Average speed in RPM
  • Average speed deviation
  • Max / min speed variation 
  • Max% / min% speed variation 
  • High pass filtered max / min speed variation
  • W&F DIN
  • W&F WRMS
  • W&F peak-to-peak
  • W&F peak-to-peak 2sigma
  • Wow
  • Flutter
  • W&F (DIN weighted)
  • Modulation frequency (primary)
  • Modulation frequency (secondary)
  • Jitter (average speed change / second)

More information about these indicators can be found here, and the complete User Manual can be downloaded here.

This is very valuable information,  allowing you to see the characteristics of the platter rotation in terms of speed stability and giving clues to where any issues might be.

Graphical representations of the speed variation, flutter component and calculated average are also available.

But there’s more… A spectrogram of the modulating frequencies and an histogram for the speed variation are also immediately available.

Connect

At the end of each measuring session, you can optionally choose to download the collected data into your smartphone (Android or iPhone), for additional analysis and / or archiving – See links for download at the bottom of the page.

The built-in Bluetooth connection allows this quick and easy transfer of data.

The common CSV file format generated by our app, allows the data to be easily read into Excel and analyzed or graphed with the supplied template.

Share

After generating the CSV file, you can submit it to our growing database of turntable performance characteristics. Just email it to us at shaknspin@sempersonus.com and we will add it ourselves.

At anytime, you can check the current database by downloading the spreadsheet here.