Many of the older models still work while the new models have the advantage of new construction materials giving some of them an attractively aesthetic quality. If sound quality is not your priority, then sure, why not? Some of the older, original models can be bought for not very much money. Should you buy one? For sound quality reasons? Probably not. It’s intriguing that, with vinyl popularity now back on the table, we are once again seeing manufacturers address this design option. With the first flush of vinyl fever, there were many turntables out there and vertical mounting was just one way to stand out from the crowd. What possessed them? Well, you’ve got to put yourself in their shoes at that time. The notion that gravity is pulling either on the arm (although there are ‘solutions’ to that one, as you’ll see below) but, more importantly, on the record itself as it swings up against this natural force, is a tremendous negative before you’ve even lifted a finger to design your deck to address the other 10,000 other issues that this configuration creates.Ī turntable is a delicate and precise piece of engineering, it seems obvious that positioning the record in a vertical manner would be problematic and yet some manufacturers did exactly that. When it comes down to it, if you wanted to build a turntable of audiophile quality and you were brainstorming ideas with a bunch of colleagues around a table and one chap suggested, “I’ve got it! Vertical turntables! We’ll tip the entire record on its side!” The boss might come back with something like, “Bob? How’s your garden doing these days? Why don’t you spend more time trimming your roses? Let’s me ring a taxi for you…”

Well, look, we’re not talking the ultimate in sound quality here. With two new vertical turntables unveiled in the last few months, we asked our tech head Paul Rigby to take a look at the curious world of vertical turntables and whether or not you should actually bother playing records on them.

Record players for sale canada