Amongst the picturesque rural suburbs of Nottingham is the home of Nottingham Analogue. Started by engineer Tom Fletcher (pictured above with loyal assistant) in 1972, the firm has been making a range of turntables and associated equipment ever since.

The factory is housed in the outbuildings of a cottage (a very real cottage industry!) and employs a small staff of enthusiasts. Their approach is the antithesis of most manufacturers, there’s no pandering to reviewers, no glossy catalogues, just simple engineering know how designed not to make hi-fi but as Tom prefers to refer to as equipment designed to create “the illusion of music”.

Tom explains this further: “We find it impossible to make new models every year or every five years. We spend thousands of pounds on ideas and research just to see if we can better the products that we have. We try changing everything, we try using all the materials other manufacturers are using but we always end up going back to our tried and tested methods and materials because we want music not hi-fi! It is the time and materials that we throw away that gives us the confidence to know that we are on the right road.”

Nottingham Analogue are very proud of the fact that all of their products are made by hand, with almost every part being produced in house. Even the lathes and milling machines are manually controlled, with not a computer in sight, just highly accurate digital readouts on the machines themselves.

The arms are mainly built in a separate outbuilding, above left is the best photo I was able to take of this room, and above right is an array of the arm parts ready for final assembly (these parts are the top of the unipivot bearing assembly).


Above: Everywhere you look there are platters for the Dais, Space deck and Hyperspace.

The platter for the Deco turntable is truly massive, and surely one of the heaviest currently being used on any turntable with a weight of nearly 30kg. It’s upside down in the picture above, but I wasn’t volunteering to turn it over!
Tom joked that if the turntable hadn’t have been successful he had the fall back plan of selling them as rather extravagant parasol bases...

The Spacedeck has been Nottingham Analogue’s single most successful product finding homes in over 10,000 music lovers systems throughout the world. Above you can see row upon row of the decks waiting to go to their new owners.

In for a service when we visited was one of their very first turntables, nicknamed ‘The Helicopter’ this rare turntable doesn’t look remotely dated, yet it was made in 1973.

Nottingham Analogue have a very clear philosophy, the result of many years of experimentation and listening, and Tom is keen to stress the importance he places in very regularly listening to live music as his reference.

All Nottingham Analogue turntables share the same basic design elements, with a lot of attention paid to the way every element resonates, hence the careful selection of materials and thicknesses used. Tom doesn’t believe in suspension so all of the decks are fixed and are box-less designs (the latter is something we take for granted nowadays, but Nottingham Analogue were one of the first to design turntables this way when the majority of manufacturers were still placing everything in a resonant enclosure).

All the decks use very low torque motors, so low in fact they are intentionally unable to start the platter spinning on their own, which leads to one of the novel features of their decks. There’s no power switch, to start it you simply push the platter to get it going and to stop it you slow it down with your hand. Simple yet perfectly logical!
The reason for using a low torque motor is to reduce vibration as much as possible, and is effectively only there to top up the platter to keep it spinning at the right speed which is possible thanks to the high mass platters used throughout the range (this taken to extremes on the larger models).


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