Richard,
Regarding R&D for my turntable, it is expensive. In fact, it is so expensive that I will probably never recover the costs. The time I tossed $1500 worth of spindles into a trash barrel comes to mind, as does the seemingly endless controller revisions. Don't expect me to forget the 79 NOS motors I bought, either! Was it worth it? Yep.
I learned the hard way, but I suppose that's how it is with most small manufacturers. R&D isn't just about buying stuff and making parts, however. It really is about learning. You think you don't know anything, and then you realize that you have been eating and breathing it for a decade, so you must have picked up something along the way. That's how R&D works; it's incremental.
Most small start-ups can't afford big time R&D, so their approach may be different from the Panasonics of this world. For me, it involved reading countless white papers that others had written. It involved making purchases of numerous vintage turntables just to see what makes them tick, and it included observations of other machines outside the audio realm. It goes on and on, and it is as much passion driven as anything else. When it is all said and done, I hope everyone who owns one of my turntables will enjoy it for a lifetime. My goal is to make a turntable for my personal use that I don't want to upgrade. Then, it's finished.
Ketchup,
I have a controller to run my turntable, too. Is it laboratory grade? I suppose so, but I never thought about it in that light before.
I suppose calling it an audiophile grade controller would have been better, but nobody would be impressed in the least with a name like that. I honestly don't know what it should be named because it will have followers and detractors, no matter what.
A story...
My friend, Dave Slagle, has been working with strain gauge cartridges ever since I have known him. Not too long ago, he developed a new type drive for them, and he built one for me. He didn't provide a power supply for it, though. So, another friend gave me a laboratory grade power supply to run the thing. It says right on the panel "Lambda Regulated Power supply", and that's a known laboratory grade one. Does that make me happy? Well, I'm waiting for that genuine Dave Slagle audiophile grade one to appear at my house. It just goes to show, you can't please everybody no matter what you do. :)
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