VPI's new "Vanquish" Ultra High-End turntable is a STUNNER!

"The second arm on the longshoreman's pier of an armboard as pictured clearly relies upon a junction box. "

Putting the tone arm at the end of a "diving board" that can flex is never a good idea.  The primary dogleg arm board appears to add a lot more mass at the suspended portion, which can only make matters worse.   There is a thread on VPI's forum that attempts to address this oversight on their current tables (adding support at the base of the tone arm as well as at the end of the outrigger).  It's too bad this tweak showed up too late for them to incorporate in the new table:

http://www.vpiforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13261#p56423


The Vanquish also sports the new 14" fatboy tone arm with no headshell offset.  HW maintains that the zero offset means no skating force and that the arm still has 2 null points.  Unless someone changed the laws of geometry, both of those assumptions are incorrect.  Not only will the arm exhibit dual skating forces (towards the spindle outside the single null and towards the record edge inside the single null), but the maximum tracking error and distortion will be higher than a 9" arm with proper offset.

As for the aesthetics, I'm with the rest of the commenters, IMO it looks ridiculous.  As far as the $120K price tag....the new HW40 with the same direct drive motor is $15K;  the magnetic platter interface was $6K;  voyager preamp was $2.5K.  That leaves over $95K for the stand and the added bling.  I guess there's one born every minute....

The DD motor has noise of 0.004, I believe measured a the headshell. VPI has made TTs with belts but nothing as quite as this and the speed is super stable.

I think you are referring to W&F; 0.004% is what HW has claimed in numerous videos, but their official specs have it at 0.008%. Both those numbers are dubious and need some explanation from VPI (i.e. what method they are using to measure it). HW says you can’t use a test record you have to use the software that is supplied by Elmo Motion Control who make the controller. I have the software, and the table measures much worse than 0.008%, more like 0.04~0.07%, which isn’t bad, but not much better than a well tuned BD table. Using a test record measures nearly the same. If you look at the output of the magnetic encoder ring they use for feedback, it looks even worse. The spec from the mfr of the ring encoder (RLS in Slovenia) is ~0.02% (system error=magnetic encoding error + sub-division error + eccentricity at 50µm), so even if the motor/controller were perfect, it’s difficult to see how W&F could drop below that.

As far as speed accuracy, the encoder they use produces 2560 pulses per rev;  the controller locks the speed to a count taken on 1 second intervals.  For 33.333 RPM, that equates to 1422.222 counts;  the controller can only work with integer counts, so they round it up to 1423 which yields a platter speed of 33.351.  Not bad, but not as good as I get with on a DIY belt drive using the RR tach and a Condor PSU (33.333 ±0.005 RPM).


I believe the reason people question the design choices and even the published specs for VPI products, is because in the past, they have made misleading or inaccurate statements, some of them so bad, they are outright laughable.



FYI, very little of the mfring is done by VPI. Most if not all of the machining is done by MDI mfring in Lakewood NJ; VPI assembles the components.

"Or perhaps run with a higher interpolation multiplier?"

I played with the numbers;  I couldn't find a solution with the current encoder that didn't produce non-integer results, except with a timing window other than 1 second.

"i assume that they are using encoder interpolation to get the count up to 2560 P/R?"

The encoder ring has 160 poles (80N/80S) spaced every 2mm. This would produce 80 PPR on its own. The pickup interpolates 8x (this is the source of the SDE or subdivision error spec) for 640 PPR. The pickup also synthesizes a quadrature output which doubles the resolution to 1280 PPR. The controller can create a count on both the positive and negative edges of both I & Q outputs so the effective resolution is 2560 PPR.  A count of 1423 for 33.333 RPM implies a resolution of ~0.07% (±1 count or 1/1423) and the software reports an error of 1 or 2 counts almost constantly.  The software can also measure the rate at which the pulses are incoming (W&F) and reports errors as high as ±10 counts although the test record method does not indicate speed fluctuations this high.  It would be helpful if VPI would give some guidance on how they measure a W&F spec 10x better than what is achievable given the hardware configuration.

Funny thing is if they used a slightly smaller encoder ring with 90 poles, it would produce integer results for 33.333/45/78 RPM at 1 sec readings (count=400/540/936).

@wspohn-  That's an interesting point. You can compare the incremental improvement in SQ of this set up, but compared to what?  I seriously doubt anyone with a $8K analog front end and $20K total system cost would install this TT into their system and notice any difference at all.  You certainly would not put an $800 cart on a $120K TT or listen to it through a pair of $1600 speakers.

I wonder how much of the incremental SQ improvement is due to the uber high end cartridge, cables, pre-amps, amps and speakers connected to this monstrosity?  I wonder how it would compare to a TechDas TT or other high end table connected to the same equipment list?