AUDIO-TECHNICA AT-LP7 TURNTABLE

TURNTABLE

Audio-Technica claims that the AT-LP7 is the best turntable it’s ever built, and reviewer Peter Giles agrees… and goes even further!

Dylan might have called it a simple twist of fate. In 1952 Hideo Matsushita, at just 22-years of age, landed a plum job at Tokyo’s Bridgestone Museum of Art where one of his duties was to organise concerts to promote LP records which had just arrived in Japan.

One of the chief difficulties in presenting these concerts was the reliability and performance of the phono cartridges available at the time, so in 1962, after deciding there was a future in building reliable high-quality phono cartridges, Hideo rented a small warehouse in Shinjuku, just across from the Imperial Palace, hired three employees, registered Audio-Technica as a brand-name and started building the AT-1 stereo phono cartridge, his first product.

Well before the time of Matsushita’s death in 2013, Hideo had turned Audio-Technica into a global company building not only phono cartridges, but also headphones, microphones, copper and optical fibre cables, visible-laser collimators and— as evidenced by this review—tonearms and turntables. The current president of Audio-Technica Corporation is Hideo’s son, Kazuo.

The equipmenT

The Audio-Technica AT-LP7 is latest in a long line of turntables made by Audio-Technica, many of which were designed specifically for the professional DJ market. It’s a two-speed (33 and 45rpm), belt-driven deck that comes fitted with a J-shaped tonearm fitted with a removable AT-HS10 headshell. Naturally the headshell itself is in turn fitted with an Audio-Technica cartridge… in this instance one from the company’s 500-Series line, the VM520EB moving-magnet phono cartridge, which has a 0.3×0.7 bonded elliptical stylus and Audio-Technica’s ‘dual magnet’ geometry, where the two magnets are positioned in such a way as to mirror the angles of the groove walls. The stylus is easily removable, enabling easy, cost-effective stylus replacements when necessary (and easy upgrades, as you’ll discover later in this review).

A moving-magnet/moving-coil phono preamplifier is built into the AT-LP7, obviating the need for an external one, so you can plug the AT-AT7’s output directly into the line input of any integrated amplifier.

However, if you’d prefer to use your own phono preamplifier, the internal preamplifier can be switched out of circuit.

The single-piece platter of the AT-LP7 is 20mm thick and is made from a non-resonant polymer known as polyoxymethylene. The platter is not fitted with a slip-mat—it’s intended that you place your LPs directly onto the platter surface… though you could easily add an after-market slip-mat (or nonslip mat) if you’d rather… which I’d personally rather, so I did. Adding a mat is made super-easy because the J-shaped tonearm

The stylus is easily removable, enabling easy, costeffective stylus replacements when necessary

enables easy vertical adjustment—even ‘onthe-fly’ if you’d like, while the record is playing—so you’ll always be able to set the vertical tracking angle (VTA) exactly, irrespective of the thickness of the mat. Also, if you decide to fit some cartridge other than the VM520EB, you’ll be able to set the correct VTA for that cartridge (which might be different from that of the VM520EB). Adjusting the height of the tonearm is super-easy, because you just flick a tiny locking knob on the tonearm post behind the anti-skate dial, then turn a large ring around the periphery of the base of the tonearm post clockwise (looking from the top) to raise it, and anticlockwise to lower it. Once you’ve correctly positioned it, you just use the locking knob to lock it into position (but give it a firm push, because otherwise it might not lock into place). Audio-Technica correctly states that you should adjust the tonearm height so that the tonearm is parallel to the record surface. This is good advice, but it’s really a starting point, because after you’ve done this, you should play several LPs while raising the arm a little and dropping it a little, all the while listening for the best sound quality, then use that setting, even if the tonearm is not quite parallel. Note also that you may also have to adjust tonearm height depending on the thickness of the LPs you play—up for thick LPs, down for thin ones.

The platter—which despite being polyoxymethylene weighs in at a substantial 2.07kg—is driven by a flat rubber drive belt that runs around the periphery of the platter and connects to a d.c. drive motor that is not only elastomerically isolated from the turntable plinth, but whose drive pulley is also elastomerically isolated from the motor. The d.c. power for the motor is provided by an external 12V/2000mA plug pack that, rather surprisingly, is actually made by Audio-Technica itself. (Most manufacturers source their plug-packs in the country in which their product will be sold in order that they don’t have to pay for product compliance certification.)

As indicated earlier in this review, the Audio-Technica AT-LP7 has a built-in phono pre-amplifier whose use means you can connect directly to any integrated amplifier, using any spare line-level input on that amplifier. The output of the inbuilt phono preamplifier is via two gold-plated RCA sockets at the rear of the turntable plinth. Alongside these sockets is a Line/Phono switch (for turning the phono preamplifier on and off) and a MM/MC switch which is set according to whether you’ve installed a high-output cartridge (MM) or a low-output device (MC). There’s also a ground (GND) terminal and a d.c. power socket (tip positive).

What the AT-LP7 does not have is a USB output, which otherwise would have allowed you to ‘digitize’ whatever LPs you were playing. I would not normally mention this in a turntable review except that since Audio-Technica provides USB outputs on several of its lower-priced models, including the AT-LP5, it would have seemed to me to have been fairly simple and cost-effective to have included a USB output on the AT-LP7. An opportunity missed? Perhaps on the ATLP7 MkII?

Audio-Technica rates the output voltage of the AT-LP7 as 4.5 mV if you’re using the ‘phono’ setting and the VM520EB cartridge, and 280mV if you’re using the ‘Line’ setting and the VM520EB cartridge (both referenced to a 1kHz sine wave recorded at 5cm/sec.)

If you are using the internal phono preamplifier, its gain is specified as being 36dB (MM) and 56dB (MC).

The Audio-Technica AT-LP7 measures 450×352×157mm (WDH) and weighs 8.3 kg. Every turntable comes supplied with a smoked Perspex dustcover that has a ‘lip’ around it so that it fits down over the plinth like a lid. It’s quite a neat arrangement, but I think I would have preferred a hinged dust cover because the design of the one provided means that every time you want to change an LP—or change sides on an LP—you have to remove the dustcover, find somewhere to put it while you’re making the change, then place the cover back on the plinth, all the while being careful not to accidentally catch the tonearm counter-weight during the process of removal and replacement.

IN USE AND LISTENING SESSIONS

The Audio-Technica AT-LP7 is so easy to assemble that you’re unlikely to need to use the Owner’s Manual (supplied as hard copy with the turntable, but also available for download from Audio-Technica’s website as a pdf) unless you’ve never previously owned and used a turntable. Basically, it’s simply a matter of fitting the platter over the (sealed) bearing assembly, wrapping the belt around the platter and drive pulley (Audio-Technica’s Owners’ Manual shows you doing this by hand, but I’d recommend using cotton gloves to ensure oils from your fingers don’t transfer to the drive belt), levelling the turntable on its four elastomerically isolated feet, fitting the headshell and counterweight to the tonearm, setting the tracking force to 2.0 grams (recommended for the VM520EB), adjusting the tonearm height, then setting the anti-skating dial to ‘2’ and the output select switch to ‘MM’. Once that’s all done, plug in the d.c. cable from the plug-pack, choose whether you want to use the internal preamplifier or not (line if you do, phono if you don’t), then connect the supplied interconnect cable to both the turntable and your amplifier.

One thing that confused me during installation was that the cartridge appeared to bear no markings of any kind (though since it comes supplied pre-installed in the headshell, the top of the cartridge could have been marked, but the markings not visible) but the flip-down plastic stylus guard had the serial number VMN20EB, when I was expecting the number to be VM520EB.

It turned out that the Audio-Technica’s local Australian distributor, Technical Audio