Clearaudio factory visit
Clearaudio is very much a family affair. Founded in 1978 by Peter Suchy today the company is run by siblings Robert and Veronika Suchy in the leafy suburbs of Erlangen near Nuremburg in Germany. Erlangen is a Siemens town, that company employs 20,000 of its inhabitants and Clearaudio occupies one of its former buildings right at the edge of the Meilwald nature reserve, a space that the company is outgrowing if the array of shipping containers around the site are any indication.
Clearaudio is a record player specialist and makes pretty much every element required for vinyl playback at this site. This includes everything from power supply electronics to cartridges and record cleaning machines, I can’t think of many competitors who cover such a broad range in-house. Recent innovations include a sub £100 cartridge with aluminium body in the N1, a remarkable feat for a medium sized company and not one that any of the dedicated cartridge brands can match, and the Compass (top of page with Robert Suchy), a complete turntable, arm and cartridge for around £1,200.
The company has also commissioned electronics engineer Javier Rodriguez Lopez to create a very different kind of battery based turntable power supply. Clearaudio has long been a proponent of battery power supplies but changes to shipping regulations has meant that this has become very difficult. Javier explained that the solution has been to put a USB port on the back of the supply that can be driven by power banks made for charging mobile phones. These things are ubiquitous and available at prices that a German hi-fi company could never match, it’s a literal bit of out of the box thinking that should give Clearaudio an advantage in the market.
Javier explained that while the Clearaudio power supplies use a toroidal transformer and large capacitors when powered from the mains, the fact that these supplies only need to produce 24V or 12V means that a simple 5V, 10,000 mAh power bank can be used to run a turntable for 24 hours. The Clearaudio power supplies will automatically disconnect from mains power when a charged power bank is connected, so operation is very simple.
They are also experimenting with high density cellulose for turntable plinths. This laminate is apparently “better than Panzerholz” for this application and comes from the world of high voltage transformers. Panzerholz is a high density wooden laminate that has been popular with German turntable makers for some time but decline in demand outside of the niche world of high end audio has made that it is getting harder to source. This alternative has a similar density and high rigidity making it highly suitable for plinth construction.
One of Clearaudio’s latest creations is the Double Smart Matrix record cleaner, this addresses one of the main issues with cleaning machines which is that they tend to be rather large. The new model is impressively compact yet able to clean both sides of a vinyl record simultaneously, apparently it uses 3D printed parts in its construction which keeps costs sensible for what is a relatively low volume product, a situation that applies across the board in high end.
The increased popularity of vinyl in the wider world has led Clearaudio to develop record player and cartridge for a broader audience. The N1 is an aluminium body, moving magnet cartridge that is priced at €99, which makes it the least expensive example of its ilk on the market today as far as we are aware. The generator is Japanese and the stylus elliptical as is the case with virtually all budget cartridges, but it has a replaceable stylus which is probably crucial at this end of the market.
There is also an entry level turntable called Compass that will be supplied with an arm and the N1, this has launched at €1,290 and has an MDF and steel chassis with an acrylic platter supported on a Concept level bearing. Compass is designed to be easily set up and comes in black or silver with a dust cover and nine inch arm with thread and weight anti-skate. The German company has achieved this impressive package price by having assembly done by Pro-ject in their Czech Republic facility but this is an all Clearaudio design with upgradeable power supply, the plan presumably to get newcomers hooked on the upgrade path so that they can discover what a serious turntable can do.
Grounding is something that has always been critical with turntables but many have come to appreciate that it is crucial to achieving low noise with all manner of equipment. Clearaudio has developed a device precisely for this purpose in Terra, a relatively compact grounding device with six terminals that is designed to remove grounding differences between components caused by different operating voltages. Technical trainer Stefan Kmuch explained that finding the optimum part of a component to fix a grounding cable is best achieved by measuring continuity between places on the chassis and earth, apparently it’s not just a case of loosening a convenient chassis bolt. Terra has a three conventional grounding points and three with ground lift to eliminate ground loops, and you can connect more than three components to each side. It is supplied with three grounding cables.
We took a tour of the Clearaudio factory and saw both CNC and old school ‘analogue’ machining tools, they do all their own metalwork and it seems that the automated equipment does the lion’s share of the work. We also saw some examples of the OEM work including the short lived Naim Solstice turntable and more up to date models for McIntosh and Marantz. It seems that they are a go to manufacturer for high end turntables with a number of high profile brands. We also saw a variety of Clearaudio turntables in production, these include the Al Di Miola Signature in the shape of a Gibson Les Paul guitar body. This is not just a styling exercise either, that model has a tachometer to monitor speed among other refinements.
The tonearm department reveals examples of OEM arms that they make for other companies, in the past these included the Naim ARO 2 and today they build the Linn Krane. Arm building is a meticulous process, the Clearaudio Unity for instance takes two days to assemble. We also saw an arm built specifically for use on a mastering lathe to test lacquers.
The micro dynamic department is where Clearaudio build cartridges using 3D microscopes and very steady hands. Turning gold coils requires 200X magnification and we watched a trainee putting a cantilever into a mounting tube, I don’t think the attention was helping though! They build some very elaborate cartridges in this part of the factory, not least the flagship Diamond Jubilee MC which has a zirconium oxide body: an extremely hard material with very high resonance stability. It uses ultra-thin 24 carat gold wire, a boron cantilever and micro-HD diamond stylus and should be handled with great care as you might imagine. That said not all of Clearaudio’s customers are as careful as they might be, one in particular who is fond of a drink or two keeps a spare Goldfinger to hand in case of accidents!
The R&D department is where the test system resides and engineers develop ways of measuring aspects of component performance in an effort to improve Clearaudio’s products. One thing they have had to do is devise an optical vinyl centring system because eccentricities in the groove relative to the centre hole make it very difficult to measure cartridge performance. They also select components such as capacitors where audible differences cannot be measured.
I was very impressed with the way that Clearaudio goes about the complex business of creating precision engineered turntables, arms, cartridges and cleaning machines. It’s not hard to see why they have been chosen to build some of the most desirable vinyl replay equipment for third party brands, there aren’t many companies in the world that can produce this standard of engineering, especially for an industry where quantities are relatively small. Robert and Veronika Suchy clearly run a tight ship as they rarely say in that part of the world.
Jason Kennedy