The Rolex of Turntables? A Swiss Watchmaker's Obsession with Vinyl

▶ Watch next — Inside a $1,000,000 Listening Room (Ron Resnick):    • Inside a $1,000,000 Listening Room — Ron R...   Micha Huber trained as a watchmaker, building movements for the Swiss watch industry while studying music on the side. He assumed he'd spend his life juggling two careers — until he realized the tonearm was where mechanics and music meet. Today his company, Thales — named for the Greek mathematician whose circle theorem solved the tangential tracking problem — builds some of the most precise analog playback instruments in the world, in Winterthur, Switzerland. At [SHOW NAME], Micha walked me through the new Thales line. The philosophy is pure watchmaking: "You would never build a watch larger than needed." While much of high-end analog goes massive, Thales packs more technology into less space than perhaps any turntable made — tangential-tracking tonearms with pivoted bearings instead of linear rails, and on the flagship Reference, a fully mechanical centrifugal governor. Spinning masses, a spring, a magnet, and a copper ring: eddy current braking brings the platter into constant self-regulating balance, so an entire record side plays with zero electronic speed correction — no servo hunting, no cogging. Switch from 33⅓ to 45 and a mechanical gear stage physically moves the belt between pulleys. We also look at the Thales Magnifier, the phono preamplifier developed with Stellavox: zero negative feedback, and an inductive RIAA — equalization performed by copper coils rather than an RC network, so the curve is applied as frequency-dependent amplification with no time distortion. Two MC inputs, RCA and XLR line inputs, two independent output stages. THE EQUIPMENT Thales Reference Turntable with Mechanical Centrifugal Governor (Switzerland) — approx. €30,000 Thales Elegance Turntable — approx. €14,000 Thales Statement Tonearm — approx. $21,000 Thales Simplicity II Tonearm — approx. $9,500 Thales Magnifier Phono Preamplifier / Preamp (with Stellavox) — approx. $40,000 Thales X-quisite Cartridges — approx. $9,000–$15,000 CHAPTERS 0:00 — Intro — Meet Micha Huber of Thales 0:25 — From Watchmaking to Tonearms 1:03 — Tangential Tracking with Pivoted Bearings 1:26 — The New Line: Thales Elegance & Thales Reference 1:44 — "You Would Never Build a Watch Larger Than Needed" 2:49 — The Mechanical Centrifugal Governor 4:10 — Eddy Current Braking — A Live Demo 4:59 — 33⅓ to 45: The Mechanical Gear Change 5:54 — The Magnifier — Inductive RIAA, Zero Feedback 6:41 — Two MC Inputs, Two Output Stages Sound with David Hyman is not sponsored or monetized. This channel exists to document serious listening culture and preserve audiophile knowledge for future generations.