“Vinyl, just the visceral feeling of it – the grooves, the tactile nature, the colours – it’s an experience lost when played horizontally. And when sitting across the room you almost have to be in a birds eye position to appreciate it,” Bapu says. “And so I felt that a record player for the modern audience should play vertically, and not just vertically in a box or linear tracking arm or anything of that sort, but vertically sort of in isolation in some respect – to look like it’s actually being appreciated as a piece for art as well as an analogue medium to play music.
“In that respect I came up with this creative strategy of a floating record player, in which the record would actually float and create this disruptive illusion that defied gravity. And it just kind of creates this majestic presence and gives a lot of attention to the record. But in that process it’s got a beautiful wood base and built-in speakers so you can just play as soon as you put the record on.”
The defining philosophy of Gramovox is to reimagine vintage design with modern technology. It’s a vision embodied by the Floating Record – a contemporary remodelling of the age-old format, which is easy to use and highly accessible. With the inclusion of two built-in 2” full-range stereo speakers, a hi-fi phono preamp, and a pre-installed AT95E cartridge, it offers all-in-one functionality. Each component ensures the experience for a first-time record listener is one of comfort and immediacy.
“With traditional turntables today, you have to buy the turntable, cartridge, adjust the cartridge,” Bapu says. “You have to buy cables, you have to buy a preamp, you have to buy speakers and you probably have to buy half a room to put that in. It’s cumbersome and it’s difficult. And I felt that with the vinyl revival movement people want ease of use. I think there are audiophiles and there are people that aren’t audiophiles that enjoy buying higher-end equipment and customising it. But I think the mainstream audience, they just want something that just works out of the box.”
The idea of an all-in-one, vertical turntable does, however, pose difficulties when it comes to producing high performance playback and sound quality. To combat these difficulties Gramovox looked to some of the most popular and world-renowned turntables for inspiration, purchasing models such as Pro-Ject’s Debut Carbon and spending a year producing hundreds of prototypes.
“We made sure that our tone arm had the right kind of innately built-in anti-skate to prevent the tone arm from skidding across the record, which is a basic element of most decent turntables,” says Bapu. “In addition to that we have an adjustable tracking force. So for ours it tracks at two grams, and that’s factory set for our particular cartridge, but that is adjustable for a user that wants to use a cartridge that’s half a gram or more.
“But in addition to that working grade, we also wanted to make sure that those that are more serious have the option of using external speakers, not just ones built into the product – which is great for convenience, but there are tonnes of audiophiles with MartinLogan speakers or Eclipse speakers or others out there. So in that respect we built our own audio circuit topology and there is an RCA audio line out so people can connect it to their own receiver and their audio system.”
BY CHRIS SCOTT
