Just for the record

When the world was giving up on turntables, Pro-Ject was just getting started. The X1 shows how far it’s come in offering value vinyl replay.

Now that the reign of the Compact Disc is all but over, we forget what an impact the silver discs had in the early 1980s. According to co-inventors Philips and Sony, CD would deliver “perfect sound forever”, plus it was smaller, played for longer without a flip, and it was more robust — one popular science show smeared it with marmalade, wiped it clean, and it played! Try that with your Pink Floyd LPs, they said.

Sure enough, in the years that followed, turntables disappeared from hi-fi stores and started appearing in garage sales instead. Australian record companies shut their local LP pressing plants. By the end of the 1980s, more than 400 million CDs were being manufactured every year, while LPs were in bargain bins for 50c a disc.

Meanwhile, in faraway Austria, Heinz Lichtenegger (see also our Musical Fidelity review this issue) was designing his first turntable, and in 1991 established a company to build it — Pro-Ject. Against all the odds, Lichtenegger’s Pro-Ject P1 turntable went on to become a success story for the fledgling company. Skip forward nearly 30 years and Pro-Ject, which now builds in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, has released the Pro-Ject X1, a direct descendant of the original P1. “We have taken our beloved original Pro-Ject 1 design and improved it in every aspect,” says Lichtenegger. “The X1 is based on the same concept as the P1, but improved in every aspect thanks to modern materials and new production methods.”

Equipment

One key to the success of the Pro-Ject P1 was its simplicity, and another its price. Turntables had become hugely complex devices, but the arrival of the P1 changed all that. Pro-Ject has certainly maintained the element of simplicity in the new X1. Changing platter speed from 33⅓ to 45rpm is just a push of a button. (The third speed, a rare inclusion these days of 78rpm, requires you to remove the platter and move the rubber drive belt.) So clearly the Pro-Ject X1 is a belt-drive design, the

drive pulley directly attached to the drive motor shaft, with the motor itself located below the platter in a recess carved into the otherwise solid multi-layer MDF plinth. The motor is attached to the plinth via two ‘engine-mount’-style vibration absorbers, while a rubber belt fixed at four places on the motor prevents axial movement. The belt drives a ribbed PFT sub-platter that rotates on a stainless-steel/brass bearing, atop which sits, in turn, the main platter, which is a single-piece slab of precision-machined white acrylic that tips the scales at 1.5kg and Pro-Ject claims is ‘resonancefree’. Atop this sits a high-quality felted slip-mat.

Power for the drive motor comes from an external 15VDC 0.8A plug-pack style adaptor, but this does not power the motor directly. Instead, an internal DC/AC generator board delivers clean, stable voltage. Pro-Ject says it adopted this design approach because although it costs more, it “performs many times better than a simple, direct-powered AC motor.”

The tonearm comes pre-installed. The arm has a carbon-fibre/aluminium ‘sandwich’ arm-tube with a fixed cartridge mount and a Kardan-style four-pin bearing. The counter-weight is said to be a newly-designed ‘anti-resonant’ type with a built-in TPE (thermo plastic elastomer) damper to reduce the unavoidable primary cartridge/tonearm resonance. The anti-skate device is a ‘string-and-weight’ device.

The effective length of the arm is rather shorter than we’re used to seeing, at ‘8.6-inches’ (218.44mm) rather than the usual 9-inches (228.6mm), presumably in order to reduce the size of the plinth. All other things being equal, a shorter arm will have greater tracing error. Despite the length, the X1’s arm incorporates both vertical tracking angle (VTA) and azimuth adjustments we don’t often see at this price point. The arm’s effective mass of 10 grams means it will work very well with all medium-compliance cartridges, either moving magnet or moving coil.

It has three height-adjustable alloy/TPE sandwich construction feet, and comes with a dustcover and a set of phono cables.

For finishes you can currently choose between high-gloss black with eight layers of paint coupled with extensive hand-polishing, or the pictured walnut veneer, also nice.

Performance

In most jurisdictions, the Pro-Ject X1 comes with a Pro-Ject ‘Pick-it S2’ moving-magnet cartridge pre-installed; here in Australia, we get to choose our own. Our suggestion would be Ortofon’s 2M Red — not an expensive cartridge, but it tracks extremely well, delivers excellent low-frequency performance, and has outstanding midrange along with very smooth and extended delivery of high frequencies, plus outstanding stereo imaging. We thought it an excellent match.

Pro-Ject’s X1 is certainly a pretty-looking turntable, and it’s also easy to use, but a turntable needs more than that. Speed accuracy for starters. According to our strobe card, the Pro-Ject X1 was running at exactly 33⅓ at that speed and almost imperceptibly fast at 45rpm, which means that while a 45rpm LP might finish fractionally earlier than it should, you won’t detect any change in the musical pitch… and that’s even if you have perfect pitch.

As for wow and flutter, slow piano music is the best for establishing the audibility of this, so we used both Michael Nyman’s Decay Music and Eric Satie’s Gymnopédies. (The version by Anne Queffélec on Virgin Classics 522 0502 is the best one to use here, we think, not only because she plays so sooo slowly, but also because she manages to make the music sound more ‘other-worldly’ than, say, Pascal Rogé, whose wonderful reading is probably more true to the score, and technically perfect, but not nearly so ethereal.)

Although the Pro-Ject X1 undoubtedly has some inherent speed variations (the specifications put these at 0.15% at 33⅓rpm), these are not audibly detectable as either wow or flutter, so the Pro-Ject PSU, motor and drive train are obviously doing a great job… and if you can’t hear wow and flutter with slow piano music, you can bet it won’t be audible with any other type of music either.

As for that other bête noire of turntables — rumble — again, it’s a certainty that it does have some rumble, but if there was any, then we couldn’t hear it. The X1 does seem to allow external environmental noise in via its feet (which we only discovered when a neighbour started removing his concrete driveway with a jack-hammer, an admittedly extreme test), so if you live in a place that has lots of external vibration and you find it affects you, you might invest in an isolation platform.

Pro-Ject’s new tonearm certainly allowed us to extract the best sound from our workhorse Ortofon 2M Red… indeed we thought it sounded as good as we’ve ever heard it, and it’s been in a good many turntables that cost way more than what’s being asked for the Pro-Ject X1. No matter what mode of music we spun, it was more than up to the task, delivering musically satisfying performances.

On a simply practical level, we were more than satisfied with the start-up time, which brought the platter up to speed (33⅓ or 45rpm) in under four seconds, and with the cueing lever which is easy to use and will also accurately drop the stylus directly down onto the LP at whatever spot you’ve chosen (and do so repeatedly, if necessary). The solid plinth means you can also easily cue by hand if you’d prefer (it’s far harder with a sprung plinth).

Conclusion

The Pro-Ject X1 has stiff competition in this price bracket — including other Pro-Ject models, such as the Debut Carbon RecordMaster HiRes with built-in phono stage, USB for computer recording, and 2M Red cartridge included. But if you’re after a high-performance turntable with a small footprint, the Pro-Ject X1 should see off all contenders.