What Hi-Fi? Vinyl Week 2026 is in full flow, and we are celebrating all things related to the format as we build up to Record Store Day 2026 on Saturday, 18th of April.
We are rolling out a mix of reviews, features and buying advice, whether you’re a seasoned vinyl-spinner or taking your first steps as a budding collector.
As part of the celebrations, we’ve reached out to some of the biggest players in the turntable space to ask their opinions on turntable design and where they think the biggest scope for improvement is. Here’s what they had to say…
“One of the most commonly overlooked parts of the turntable is the platter bearing. A lot of well-known designs use a near sliding fit – meaning the gap between the spindle and the bearing housing is very small.
"This is used to control the bearing's stability, but the downside is that more friction is created between the spindle and bearing housing due to the tight fit. Friction causes vibration, which acts as direct mechanical interference with the cartridge signal, resulting in smearing.
"The double jeopardy here is that friction is rarely uniform, so it also causes minute changes in speed stability that affect the smooth delivery of the groove to the stylus, where the cartridge is such a sensitive generator (it's tracking a groove the width of a human hair moving side to side at up to 20,000 times a second).
"Minute shifts in speed can be more audibly harmful to the signal than a speed variation that's rising and falling smoothly over a few seconds.
"This is a compromise faced by designers, and also why wow measurements [measure of speed stability] can be misleading on sound quality – you could have a drive with vanishingly low wow, but a high friction bearing, or you could have a low friction bearing with 0.1-0.2 wow.
"One may have measurably perfect speed stability, but with smeared transients due to friction. The other would have clearer transients due to low friction, but slightly less speed stability.
"Finding a bearing design with the lowest possible friction, capable of absolute speed stability, is the challenge, and there are countless ways to approach the problem, conventional and unconventional.
"The key to improving bearing design is a willingness to experiment and a scepticism that measurable results are the be-all and end-all. Rather its about finding satisfying results in audible transients."
