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The footers too are solid and contain no springs or viscoelastic dampers of any sort. They rest in equally solid turned aluminium retainers. We’re thus dealing with a classic undamped mass-loaded device. Should issues arise with acoustic speaker interaction, Transrotor recommends to place their deck atop a heavy damped plate. This they claim is  superior to competing sub chassis which by design are in constant motion to introduce an undercurrent of unrest into the sonic image. The motor is a 20-pole synchro affair proven over decades and powered from an external supply. The motor itself only requires 100 milliamperes of current but the included Konstant Studio supply—available separately for €420—delivers 800mA which is still well within the built-in 24VA transformer’s headroom. For this overkill specification Transrotor promises sonic advances from lowered distortion in the supply current. The supply supports 33.3 and 45RMP speeds.

Speed changes are accomplished with a rotary switch on the PSU and fine adjustment via trim pots. A Wienbrücke or RC elements in series set the correct frequencies ("we avoid digital even in the power supply" is the associated mantra). A speed confirmation device isn’t included but I checked the table when delivered and found it spot on. The motor is obscured by the surrounding platter and in use invisible. Still its housing is highly polished as you’d expect from Transrotor by now. Included with the deck is a setup guide for proper placement of footers and motor. This makes assembly a cinch. In use the motor housing has no connection with the plinth save for the drive belt. This prevents transfer of vibrations.

A short rubber belt drives the bearing, the so-called TMD or Transrotor Magnet Drive. That makes the Crescendo the most affordable model in this catalogue to include it. The bearing consists of two halves. The lower one is fixed to the axle and driven by the belt. The upper one sits in ball bearings to carry the platter. Coupling between the two halves is magnetic via small embedded but very powerful Neodymium magnets which are properly shielded to prevent exposing the cartridge to their radiated fields. As the motor rotates the lower half, the magnetic field drags the upper half with it.

The trick of this power transfer scheme is that it allows for a bit of slippage to linearize motor speed variations and, so says Transrotor, create a very calm stable soundstage. Any vibrations caused by the motor itself must find their way through the support surface the deck sits on into its footers, then into the chassis and onward through the decoupled magnetic bearing to finally interfere with cartridge tracking. To show my hand early, even very high playback levels didn’t exhibit any motor noise running through lead-in grooves. The mechanical disconnect between motor and data extraction proved brilliantly effective. The deck nude demands €4.700. Stock trim of arm and cart are the Transrotor TA800s (obviously a Jelco ST250) and Transrotor Merlo, the latter a modified Goldring Elite. Transrotor has this built with a more forgiving needle rounded over to 8x40 microns suspended in an alu body to prevent the sound from turning too analytical. Arm and cart demand €800 individually. Packaging with the table applies a 20% discount. The final system as reviewed thus clocks in at €5.980. Of course other packages exist as well with Transrotor’s take on the long SME arms (Räke imports SME for Germany) and the Merlo Reference pickup whose needle is cut more sharply.