Audio-Technica AT-LPW50PB Manual Belt Drive Turntable - Piano Black

Product Information

years as a part of the ‘95’ series. As with all the new AT-VM95 Series, it features the same dual-magnet design which, according to audio-technica “duplicates the ‘V’-shaped arrangement of the magnets in the cutter-head [of the recording lathe] and precisely positions the magnets to match the positions of the left and right channels in the groove walls”

The red trace on Graph 4 shows channel separation vs. frequency and you can see that channel separation reaches a best result of 27dB at 1kHz (7dB better than specification), and maintains this level of performance out to around 6kHz before diminishing to around 20dB at 10kHz and down to 10dB at 20kHz. Currently at the top of that list is the AT-LPW50PB, available in Australia after some anticipation, given that it launched in the USA at virtual CES 2020. The AT-LPW50PB is the top model among the belt-driven budget players, but has to find itself well behind the more elaborate mid-range player AT-LP7 in the hierarchy. This one also has belt drive, but at double price. Hear all the detail that’s been missing from your records, with the beautifully engineered Audio Technica AT-LPW50PB.

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On this album van Veen stretches the concept of slowness to the extreme. One critic wrote of it that: “he creates an hallucinatory effect, a kind of minimal music avant la lettre.”

The high dynamics of the album, which, in addition to acoustic orchestra and vocals typical of Woodkids, also offer a wealth of electronic sounds, do not cause any stress for the inexpensive player. This confident impression is repeated in other records from current and ancient production. With the LPW50PB you can also venture into “difficult” material and don’t have to be afraid of dynamically mixed vinyl discs. It’s also a piece that’s played by almost every amateur pianist on the planet because of all the most well-known piano pieces, it seems to be the easiest to play because if you look at the score, you’ll see it’s almost blank, with some spaced-out chords that don’t require much of a finger-stretch and then only crotchets everywhere else — there’s not a quaver to be seen, much less a hemidemisemiquaver. But when you try to play it… wow! It’s so difficult to make it flow. The AT-LPW50BT-RW turntable made the album sound even better when it had a wired connection to a component system. I tested it with both the built-in phono preamp and through my own NAD phono stage. The dedicated NAD unit sounded better with slightly more detail, but not by as much of a margin as I expected. Should you buy the Audio-Technica AT-LPW50BT-RW turntable? We put on the current Woodkid album S16: The Audio-Technica AT-LPW50PB presents the lush string arrangements in a wide and powerful way in an impressively large space. That should correspond to the intention of the producer, who not without reason put the orchestra in London’s Abbey Road Studios recorded. Their huge Studio 1 is famous for its rich, wide sound. And Audio-Technica reproduces this very well.

Likewise, a built-in phono-line preamp lets you connect up to a home stereo or powered speakers (that wouldn’t have a phono stage of their own) as soon as you plug the turntable in, letting you get to your tunes straight away. The AT-LPW50PB is equipped with a built-in selectable phono preamp and a detachable dual RCA output cable to enable direct connection to components with or without a dedicated phono input. FEATURES The carbon fiber tonearm is cleanly finished and sonically helpful. However, the bearings could be better. Measured at 45 rpm, the AT-LPW50B’s platter speed was even more stable, so that the measured frequency varied only between 2998Hz and 3000Hz. Again, this is an excellent result. Newport Test Labs has plotted these variations in the speed histogram (Graph 1). One of my favourite recordings was recorded by Dutch pianist Jeroen Van Veen in two different versions, both of which are on a double-LP set pressed by Brilliant Classics titled ‘Erik Satie Slow Music: Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes, And Other Works.’ Van Veen achieves a sublime perfection that eludes most pianists. I suspect his success might be because he’s not only also a composer but is also considered by many experts to be one of the leading exponents of minimalism in the world today. These traits, along with him being a great pianist, are obviously what’s required to make the music work!