Technics SP-10RE-S Reference Direct Drive Turntable

Technics distills its decades of turntable experience into this flagship reference product

Looking at that beautiful brass platter, solid plinth, and heavy external PSU, you instantly know that Technics has taken its long experience with creating vibration-rejecting turntables and distilled that into reference design. 

Of course, the SP-10 isn't a new brand name, having debuted in about 1970 as the direct-drive turntable on the market. The revival of the SP-10 Series establishes a new reference point for the modern high-fidelity turntable. For the SP-10RE-S, Technics has brought all of its newest material and engineering learnings into suppressing motor vibration, providing a heavy platter, having a separate control unit, and offering minute adjustment of rotational speed.

Coreless Direct Drive

Traditional motors have an iron core that spins in a magnetic field, and as each arm of the core hits the nearest magnetic field, it accelerates slightly and then slows down as it leaves. This results in a jerky rotation that's known as cogging. Iron cores are an older solution, and a coreless motor eliminates this by supporting the coils in a non-magnetic structure that offers silky smooth and eevn rotation. 

You will instantly hear this in "decays", for example when a piano note is struck and allowed to resonate, a speed stable turntable will not exhibit wow and flutter as that note fades away. 

Technics also uses a twin-rotor construction that reduces the bearing load while maintaining high torque, and this overall lower stress reduces minute vibrations during rotation.

The motor in the SP10RE was developed for the SL-1200G launched in 2016, and further improved. This double coil twin rotor-type coreless motorhad coils on both sides for 12-pole, 18-coil drive, with high enough torque to drive a very heavy platter. Offsetting the coils on both sides 60 degrees improved the rigidity of the substrate, suppressing fine vibrations and reducing self-inductance. These improvements achieved stable rotation of 0.015% wow and flutter or less, which is considered to be the measurement limit.

Tungsten Platter Weights

The turntable platter uses tungsten weights on the periphery of a 10 mm thick brass weight. The brass weight is laminated onto the aluminum die-cast, giving the platter a total weight of approximately 17.4 lb. A deadening rubber for eliminating unwanted vibration is also attached to the rear surface to form a three-layer construction and achieve high rigidity and excellent vibration-damping characteristics.

Separate Control Unit

The control unit is separated from the main unit to suppress the effects of unwanted noise on the main unit. In order to achieve a power supply circuit that provides good regulation for high torque, a switching power supply is used. To reduce the noise reaching the pickup, the switching power supply is equipped with a unique technology that provides a voltage supply with minimal noise by a newly developed "unwanted noise reduction circuit". Also, to minimize the noise even during communication, a highly reliable system that resists the effects of external noise is used for communication between the main unit and the control unit. These thorough noise-reduction measures achieve the world's highest-level S/N.

Minute Adjustments

This turntable supports not only LP (33 1/3 rpm) and EP (45 rpm) analog records, but also SP (78 rpm). Rotation can also be set to two decimal places from the control unit.

Specifications

Dimensions (WHD)
Table: 14-3/8" × 4-5/16" × 14-3/8"
Control Unit: 4-11/32" × 3-5/16" × 13-25/32"

Weight
Table: 40.2 lb.
Control Unit: 4.7 lb.