You have two washers over the spindle in the label cut-out - why?
The two large washers placed over the spindle hold the record about 80/1000ths of an inch off of the platter so when you put the record clamp on and tighten it, the record is forced down over the washers to sit perfectly flat on the platter. So now we have eliminated the pulses and you don't have the ringing from a vacuum leak. It sounds much better and holds down just as well as a
vacuum. It will not take out a bad pinch warp but neither will a vacuum because you can't get it to seal. We use the largest platter air-bearing I've ever seen built. It is 10" in diameter and the spinning mass on this turntable with platter is close to 75 pounds. Yet it only takes approximately 1.2 pounds of air pressure to lift it approximately one 10,000ths of an inch with very low air flow.

By clamping the record down over the washers, you're effectively coupling the record to the 75 pound platter?


That's correct. It's so effective that before we did the air suspension, I would lift up one edge of the record while it was playing. Let go of it and it would snap back down and go "Pow!" but you would hear nothing over the speakers. Naturally, you can't do that with the air-suspended table or it would change the balance of the table.

Let's finish up with a little bit of remaining history. By the 80s, you still were not in the industry?

Well, we were selling some cables and accessories, you know, but more or less as a hobby and sideline.


What prompted you to leave your stable industry and trade that for building a turntable and a much more uncertain future?
Well, being a controls engineer, I was a start-up engineer. I started up nuclear power plants, chemical plants, refineries, pharmaceutical plants, whatever... And I would go there with a team. We would calibrate the instrumentation, check out the controls, program the instrumentation and computers, start the process up, tune the system, get it on-line and working in automatic, then train their personnel on how to keep it running and then leave for the next job. We would enter each job near to completion when the client was ready to go and held up merely by the work we needed to do. It was an extreme amount of overtime crunch. We're talking 7 days a week, 12 hours a day on a start-up like this. Additionally, the engineer behind the desk can get 90% of everything working while the other 10% have to be redesigned in the field. It's a lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of traveling. So we just decided, the heck with it - been there, done that, let's get it on with audio for a change.

This was in the mid 90s?
Yes, mid 90s.
And the leap, logically, from what you'd been playing with was the turntable - the air bearing,,,
Right, that was part of it. I had already gotten into some exotic electronic designs. What made the difference from an engineering perspective -- and I discovered that right away -- was to read the book, know the book, throw the book down and then ask, what if? Because if you use the same old design principles, you always end up building the same black Model A Ford. To do something different, you gotta think different. Hey, isn't that some ad slogan somewhere?
So your philosophy is, "Question everything?"
That's right. And you have to think "What if?" and then build it and implement it and sit down and listen. And it's not easy because if there's another flaw, then it'll show up. In other words, that's one of the problems with reviewing and testing parts and pieces. If one particular piece is superior to the other even in the component parts realm, it'll show up flaws somewhere else. So when I'm designing a phono amp or whatever, if I hear something with that particular component that sounds better but overall isn't as good as what we were already using, I will tag it, put down its characteristics and then we'll get through with the design. We'll come back later and then pull out these pieces that something else was better about, reinsert those and re-evaluate - because if something's flawed downstream, it can make something better upstream sound bad.

You've seen one reviewer put a preamp in his system and say, "This thing is the state of the art; it's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard," and the next reviewer puts it in his system and says, "What? Is this guy deaf? This is the biggest piece of crap I have ever heard!" Well, they both heard what they heard but one perhaps used better power cords with it, maybe used some resonance control, his rack was better, his system was different than the other man's and that's part of the reason right there. For instance, that's why Omega Mikro makes two power cords, a red and a blue one. Because it depends on how the component's power transformers were directionally wired. To get a perfect power cord match with this component, you have to listen to both power cords which are identical except for being wired in opposite directions. And there's a big difference between the two. Right and wrong is easy to tell. So that's the way we did it.

What was the evolution of your turntable design?
The first prototype was at the 1996 Stereophile show in New York. We cast 46 different marble bases before we had one we could use and paint. We built the table, listened to it for 30 minutes, packed it up and left for the show just in the nick of time. That table sat on our Valid Points, had no cueing, no arm damping, no motor controller and the arm was still aluminum. We were voted Best Sound of Show by 70% of the press, a 'must see' room, and we came in number three in first-place public votes – and no one knew who Walker Audio was before that event.

We developed the carbon fiber arm next, then the adjustable clamping and cueing. Then came the Precision Motor Controller and the Ultimate Motor Controller and then the automatic air suspension – and that was a killer. You wouldn't believe what we went through. It took six months just to settle on how many suspension units we'd use, at what sizes, where to locate them and what types of materials to use to couple them to the table. It took another six months to develop the unique under-the-table damping chambers and air distribution system. We built 50 prototypes and all testing was by ear.

So was it a series of evolutionary steps with a Proscenium Bronze, Silver, Gold....
We did make two silver turntables. One was a prototype that a guy bought real cheap - you know, we more or less gave it to him. The second Silver was bought by a man who became involved with a divorce and had to sell it. That's the one Dr. Bill Gaw from EnjoyTheMusic bought. His does not have air suspension but it's been otherwise upgraded to the latest specs. We only make one model now.

The number of incremental changes that have occurred over the past five years - could you put a number on how many -- dozens? -- just to give some idea ...


Probably about 25, I would say. Most of those tables have all the new upgrades in it.
So these upgrades were retrofittable?
Yes, they are retro-fittable and most of the tables in the market have been updated to current specs with the exception of maybe three or four, perhaps five. One thing we discovered right away is that adjustable VTA during play is probably one of the worst things you could ever put on a tone arm.


Why? I loved it on the Graham arm and it spoiled me. The ability to adjust VTA while playing is certainly convenient.

Well if you notice, when you adjust some arms while they're playing and you run the adjustment up and down from top to bottom over the whole range, you'll notice some differences but it's not huge. You change the butt of the VTA on our table 1/1000th of an inch and you can hear it plain as day. It's enormous but every time you set the VTA, it's locked in place. The arm cannot flex or move. To adjust an arm during play, something has to be left loose so the arm itself is wobbly. When you're talking about trying to read information in a groove that operates down into the micron size, iron-clad stability is critical. If you leave an arm loose enough for VTA adjustment during play, it will flex and you will lose dynamics, information etc. You just give up too much music for a few minutes of convenience.