VPI JMW-9 Brochure
that hail from analogue’s heyday.
Likewise, there are still seriously
expensive designs that employ the
approach but that merely underlines
the precision, cost and effort it takes
to get around the associated problems.
Instead, we see designs from
Clearaudio, Kuzma, Amazon, Verdier,
Project, Well Tempered and VPI which
all employ the simplified approach.
Don’t they suffer from motor
noise contaminating the
signal they produce?
Yes they do, to varying
degrees, but it’s a problem
that can be mitigated by
today’s improved isolation
platforms and motor power
supplies. And they all benefit from
dramatic improvements in speed
stability and dynamic range, as well
as other things we’ll get to.
But the other thing that
I realised was even more
interesting. Out goes the
old in comes the new. But along
with the departing thinking go all the
associated rules. We always used to
spend the lion’s share of the budget
on a turntable, followed in turn by the
arm and finally the cartridge. The Rega
RB300 already put a dent in that theory,
but remove the expensive suspension
and the complexity that entails and
you’re really starting to go places. Given
the stability possible from a basic solid
plinth, just how good an arm can you
sit on it? Enter then the VPI Aries Scout
turntable and JMW 9.0 tonearm, an
£1100 combination that burns half
the budget holding the cartridge up.
It’s a proposition that would have been
completely unmarketable a few
years ago.
Of course, there’s more to the
Scout/9.0 set-up than that. Harry
Weisfeld has been making turntables
for far too long to miss a trick. Having
said that, the original impetus for the
design came from this side of the pond.
VPI’s Dutch distributor, Johan
Bezem of Audio Classics,
wanted something
that embodied the
ease of set-up and
compact practicality
of the Aries in a
cheaper package. It
goes without saying that
he also wanted to maintain
as much of the Aries’ performance
as possible. We’ll see in a moment
whether or not the Scout meets that
stiff brief, but in the meantime we’ll
see how Harry set about it.
No prizes for guessing that the
basic structure remains the same. The
Scout uses a solid plinth, isolated on
four conical feet, the motor mounted
in its own separate housing. Although
the plinth is thinner than that on the
Aries, it’s still a pretty substantial lump,
constructed from a sandwich of 30mm
MDF with a slab of steel bonded to its
underside. That creates a self damping
combination, the glue acting as
a constrained layer. The conical feet
are mounted on threaded posts
allowing for levelling. In the Scout
these dispense with the compliant
mountings of the Aries, seating instead
against delrin discs. The feet themselves are more than simple
aluminium cones, each being
87
VPI Aries Scout Turntable
and JMW 9.0 Tonearm
by Roy Gregory
EQUIPMENTREVIEW
It suddenly occurred to me the other
day that the world has changed.
Gradually, bit by bit, without you even
noticing, the status quo is overturned
and things just aren’t what they used to
be. You wake up and realise that some
self-evident truth that you’d always
taken for granted was simply no longer
the case. It can come as quite a shock.
I mean, who would ever have thought
the day would come when serious
turntables used anything other than
a suspended sub-chassis? But the truth
is plain. There are plenty of new
turntable designs hitting the market,
and fewer and fewer of them employ
a floating sub-chassis. Instead, the
new hegemony revolves around solid,
damped plinths with motors placed
in separate mass loaded housings.
It’s not hard to understand
a sprung sub-chassis and you
are using that suspension
to isolate the stylus record
interface from vibrational energy
emanating from the motor. This is
unquestionably a good thing. However,
it has its down sides too, most notably
the poor coupling between the motor
and the platter leading to lousy speed
stability and limited dynamic range.
Of course, when that was all we had,
we knew no better, but once CD came
along, especially once we actually
got it to work, suddenly poor speed
stability and compressed dynamics
were only too obvious to all who
heard them. From that day onward,
even though we didn’t realise it, the
classic three-point suspended turntable
was a dying breed. They still exist, but
for the most part they represent designs
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