Vertere Acoustics launches Tempo Motor Drive

Touraj Moghaddam Vertere’s founder and chief designer announced that the new Tempo motor drive had commenced shipping.Tempo is a new generation’ digital’ motor drive, unlike its sibling, the analogue SG motor drive. Sitting a little above the well-established SG at £2850, $3995 and €3598, Vertere expects that sales will quite quickly overtake the SG after customers enjoy a comparative demonstration.Initially, Vertere expects Tempo to sell with Vertere’s SG-1 and RG-1 Turntables with SG-1 tonearms. MG-1 customers will also migrate to Tempo over time. Given the performance improvement it is unlikely to be too long. The need for TempoThe music we hear when playing vinyl records, in reality, comes from the motor.
The motor is the only source of energy in the system. It is this energy that drives the record past the stylus, thus making the music we hear.Any amount of noise or fluctuation in the drive system will adversely impact the music. Detail, dynamics, timbre, timing and musicality are just some of the qualities that will suffer as a result. The Technical BitTempo Precision Motor Drive derives from Vertere’s reference motor drive. It uses some of the reference drive’s most advanced control circuit design.Tempo controls the record player motor and provides a smoother drive with lower noise and lower distortion. As with the reference motor drive, its internal circuit is uniquely microprocessor-based. It provides a pure sine wave in the digital domain, converted to analogue via an onboard DAC. Two waveforms are derived, a cosine and a sine, amplified using two bridged amplifiers to power the motor.Exceptional attention to detail, including a gold-plated PCB, four fully regulated voltage rails powering different circuit sections, and carefully selected components ensure in-control and ‘clean’ final delivery of power to the motor. The entire digital, microprocessor and DAC, circuitry is first shielded by copper foil, and then the whole PCB is secondary shielded using a stainless steel shield plate.

The FeaturesA high-quality mode and speed selector switch allow the unit to be programmed to provide three modes for the white power indicator LED and facilitate easy switching between 33 & 45 rpm.The motor output high-quality gold plated 7-way locking connector connects the Tempo to the record player via a dedicated motor link that internally utilises two Pulse-R drive cables, and a separate D-Fi LED power cable.

The SummaryTempo enhances the musical performance and makes the experience of listening to vinyl on the RG-1 or the SG-1 closer to the original master. It is pretty surprising how much of an improvement Tempo delivers, given that the SG motor drive already gives superbly clean power. Vertere confidently suggests a listening test. SpecificationsInput: 30VDC from a selected universal mains wall wart.Output: Pure sine and cosine waves approx. 17.5VDimensions: 220 x 128 x 58 (D x W x H mm) Incl. Selector & FeetNet Weight: 1.3kg Touraj explains the source of some of his background knowledge“Our collaboration with music industry engineers has given us invaluable insights into the art of cutting. This knowledge has enabled us to advance our record player design in many ways to extract the maximum from vinyl records.For example, with his recent remixes of the Beatles albums, Giles Martin – son of the late Sir George – used a Vertere MG-1 record player including SG-1 tonearm and PHONO-1 preamplifier throughout to check and approve the acetates and the test pressings.And we’ve worked closely with the multi-award-winning mastering engineer Miles Showell: since February 2017.Miles has been using his own extensively customised Neumann VMS 80 lathe, incorporating Vertere cables, to cut normal and half-speed masters for the likes of ABBA, Cream, The Police and The Rolling Stones, and also the 50th-anniversary release of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles (otherwise known as ‘The White Album’).Working closely with Mileshas led to the first releases on our record label Vertere Records. Releases: a three-track EPand first albumby Scottish band Caezar, and the first album by Dutch singer/songwriter Elles Springs, which was specially tape-transferred and then half-speed mastered and cut by Miles for our label.It’s only by involving ourselves at every stage of the record-making process that we can ensure our players bring you as close as possible to what the artists and engineers wanted you to hear.” About VertereReducing engineering to its fundamentals, to get you even closer to the original recording.When aiming to reproduce the complexities of music, it’s all too easy to introduce even more significant complication in the engineering of audio equipment, putting in place one element to solve the problems of another until the whole design escalates into something fiendishly intricate – and expensive.That’s not the Vertere way: coming at the whole problem with decades of audio and mechanical engineering experience, plus close collaboration with the recording and mastering industry, we step back, take a long hard look at the fundamentals, and look for simple, elegant solutions.That may sound like a simple ‘less is more’ philosophy, but we prefer to look at it this way: the best audio equipment shouldn’t add anything to or take away anything from the original recording. Instead, it should affect it as little as possible; bringing the listener ever closer to what the artist, producer and mastering engineer wanted you to hear.

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