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REVIEW: Helius Designs Alexia Turntables

Model:	Alexia
Category:	Turntables
Suggested Retail Price:	£3200 UK pounds
Description:	Suspended, belt-driven with optical platter speed correction
Manufacturer URL:	Helius Designs

Review by KevinF on February 28, 2012 at 01:46:30 IP Address: 109.224.143.233

Add Your Review for the Alexia

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Helius Designs Alexia –
A discussion and review of the pre-production prototype

Is it difficult to spend even half an hour in the company of physicist, engineer, oenophile, gastronaut and high-end audio designer Geoffrey Owen without getting swept away by his multiple interests and his appetite for exploration, and for life.

Whether the subject is charcuterie, or the way the rotation of a turntable platter is affected by the drag of a stylus that is tracking large dynamics on a record, it’s always pure Owen – an infectious enthusiasm underpinned by a meticulously researched and informed understanding of the subject.

Helius Designs, Owen’s company, is now into its second incarnation as high end analogue component specialist. In its first life, Helius designed and made tone arms including the Orion and the Cyalene, spanning the medium to high-end of the market. When production of the Cyalene ceased in 1997 as digital strangled analogue, Owen thought he’d designed his last audio product and he repositioned Helius to concentrate on laser-based aspheric scanning optics, finally moving into laser telecommunications technology.

But just a few years later, with vinyl once more showing signs of life, Owen was back at his CAD system developing another high-end arm, the Omega. Embodying all that Owen had learned, it was to be the flagship of a new range of Helius Designs tone arms, laying the foundation for a re-birth of the audio brand. Today, Helius Designs has a renewed and strong presence in the high-end, and it offers three different tone arms.

The Alexia – due to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2012 - is the company’s first turntable. Significantly, it embodies the same scientific and engineering rigour that underpins Helius Designs tone arms, and is designed and built as a complementary system. Helius Designs would like customers to team the turntable with a Helius arm and thus maintain sonic integrity and purity. However, Owen accepts that not everyone will appreciate such a prescriptive approach and he is relaxed if people want to use another arm. “It should work very well with most high-end tone arms although of course we would argue that you’ll get the absolute best from it if you use one of ours.”

I was loaned a pre-production prototype of the Alexia to try in my own system. It had already done the rounds of Owen’s circle of friends in the industry including selected dealers. He was now keen for me to try it because my own home audio system incorporates an Omega arm, making me representative of the kind of existing Helius customer potentially susceptible to a cross-sell.

Since for the listening test I’d be using my known and very familiar system including cartridge and arm, and simply substituting my Voyd turntable for the Alexia - one record rotating mechanism for another - the trial promised to be focussed, illuminating only the differences between the two turntables and the way the arm and cartridge interacted with them. I well knew what I heard when records rotated on the Voyd. How would they sound when spun instead by the Alexia?

At the medium to high end, existing turntables – and boy, when you start looking, there is a surprising number of them – mainly cleave to one of two alternative key design principles, each a different response to the same two headline technical challenges which can suck the life out of the music on an LP.

The first challenge is that of fluctuations in platter rotation speed, the second that of acoustic interference.

Owen says that it’s not difficult or costly to design a system that simply spins a platter at a constant speed. Just feed a reasonable quality motor with stable voltage and current; job done. But a problem arises when the platter is spinning an LP because then it has to deal with constantly changing stylus-in-groove friction as the cartridge tracks large dynamics in recordings. The platter slows down, then speeds up again, destroying the timing, rhythm and dynamics of the playback.

The Teutonic school of thought – vendors in this camp are mostly all German for some reason – favours extremely heavy platters, some weighing in at as much as 15Kg, that smother acoustic interference with their ultra-monolithic mass and whose rotational kinetic energy, akin to that of a minor planet, simply steamrollers flat any micro rotational inconsistencies caused by groove friction.

The alternative approach typically features a relatively low-mass suspended platter driven by multiple high-torque motors. The motors are often fed by individual power supplies that on ultra-high-end gear can get very large indeed. The suspension aims to isolate the platter from acoustic interference while the motors simply overwhelm rotational irregularities with their sheer grunt.

Both these approaches can work, says Owen, but at what price? He believes the competing spiral of platter weight and motor horsepower only ends up costing the consumer more, and makes the turntables less easy to live with.

“The only event that causes a well-driven platter to change speed is the ever-changing level of friction between the stylus and groove...and this is, frankly, tiny. We aren’t talking magnitudes of energy akin to the space shuttle on throttle-up,” says Owen. “The amount of energy generated around the stylus is measured in the milliwatts, as demonstrated by cartridge outputs; ergo, I have to ask myself if NASA were asked to design a turntable, would they employ massive platters and the huge horsepower motors? I doubt it.

“Personally, I think it’s about time turntable design caught up with modern engineering and, in respect of the motor control, my contribution is to manufacture a product with real-time correction.”

Owen hit on his alternative approach after listening to the first movement of the Saint Saens organ symphony and realising that the deceleration of the platter that he heard during the immense dynamics of the piece were not instantaneous events; that there was time to register a change of state and apply correction, given the speed of modern electronics. And so the first of the Alexia’s radical design responses was born: an optically encoded drive that monitors the rotational speed of the platter 270 times a second and applies micro corrections via the motor in real-time. Note: the platter speed, not the motor speed are measured, thus ensuring the feed-back-loop is able to react more quickly to frictional influences.

The approach means there is no need for a heavy platter, or for multiple high-torque motors, or for huge PSUs. Alexia’s platter is machined from Delrin, weighs just 2.4 Kg, and turns on a silicon nitride bearing. A simple Maxon 10W motor imparts the spin, transmitting it through a capstan and a belt that runs around the circumference of the platter. The optically encoded speed correction circuitry does the rest – resulting in a rotational stability that, Owen says, equals that of the two legacy approaches, but at a fraction of the cost, weight and complexity.

Somewhat in disbelief that such a system could really react quickly enough and apply sufficient additional torque to overcome resistance, I tried grasping the platter spindle twixt finger and thumb while a record was playing. Try as I might to stop it rotating, the record continued to spin with no audible pitch changes.

As for the more common performance benchmarks, Helius Designs has measured rumble and wow and flutter of -55 dB and 0.03% respectively, which Owen says is on a par with or better than other turntables at the Alexia’s price point.

Incidentally, Delrin is the choice of platter material because it has virtually the same acoustic impedance as a vinyl LP. Other materials would add or subtract in a way unhelpful to the Alexia’s design goal of faithfully extracting only the music locked into the record grooves, says Owen.

The suspension of the Alexia is also a first. Owen is in no doubt that suspension is desirable. Properly designed, it can minimize the transmission of acoustic energy that prevents vinyl playback from reaching its full potential. He suggests – and with not even a hint of a smile – that the theoretical ideal would be to have in one room a humungous block of granite with a large sunken bearing and a heavy platter made of virgin vinyl. The motor would be in the next room with a long inelastic belt driving the platter. And the speakers? Well, they would be in a third room, obviously. “Crucially, they must not be in the same room as the turntable – and this is why I believe in suspension.

Personally, I can’t wait for a manufacturer to take Owen’s blueprint and offer for sale the world’s first three-room turntable. I’d put money on them being German.

But Owen is way less childish. “It would be nice to say that rarely in real life does the table get shaken so much that the stylus is inclined to jump. But the reality is that unless you’re on the ground floor with the hi-fi on a concrete slab, you will never have a rigid floor.

“Deep bass passing through a wooden floor will go straight up into the sub chassis; air is sucked in and out as the woofers move and the cartridge is not that dissimilar from a microphone. Bass, and lower mid music, will set up a delay line and linger past the event. Soft skin drums used by the likes of Kodo are the worst – infrabass can rumble on beautifully.”

To protect against such effects, many manufacturers employ variations on a basic theme of three springs held captive in supporting pillars. But Owen says it’s a recipe for sonic impurity. If one spring moves, the other two are obliged to react. The belt drive oscillates as the tension varies, and then the stylus starts scrubbing. The music suffers from pitch errors until the movement damps out.

The Alexia uses an altogether more sophisticated engineering solution in which motor, platter and arm share a single sub chassis that in turn is suspended on a double wishbone, similar in concept to that used on car suspension. The double wishbone is tuned to oscillate at 1.5 Hz, allowing the sub chassis to move, but only in a perfectly vertical plane to protect from deep bass frequencies. Lateral movement is impossible.

The construction of the sub chassis is also critical. It might be supposed that musical energy only travels through the arm, but in fact an equal amount goes down into the platter and then the sub chassis – which explains why the type of platter material and even that of add-on mats can make such a difference to how a turntable sounds. As the two wave fronts meet in the sub chassis, phase differences that cancel each other are sonically benign, but peaks that clash can ring around the sub chassis and cause smearing.

The sub chassis on the Alexia is metal for torsional rigidity, and damped with a thick layer of Perspex, to ensure that high frequencies cannot go back into the arm, and that peaks of energy travelling in opposing directions cannot ring. It is a design feature that, says Owen, greatly contributes to the Alexia’s sonic purity.

A final point of note – actually a nice touch – is that the integral arm board, for Helius arms naturally, can be turned by 180 degrees simply by undoing its fixing bolts. It can thereby accommodate both 9” and 10” arms without requiring further expenditure. Helius Designs will be offer other arm boards over tme.


Listening
The pre-production prototype I was loaned arrived with an Omega arm, identical to mine, already fitted. In contrast to a multi-spring suspension turntable such as the Voyd, the Alexia could not have been simpler to set-up. A single turn screw enables suspension ‘flying height’ to be set. There’s no juggling multiple spring tensions in order to achieve a level platter. The chassis is also a snap to set up. It stands on three points, a fixed rear one and two front domed feet that screw up or down. Spirit levels on the platter, a few twists underneath at the front - and the job was done. I then swapped my Audio Note IO II cartridge across.

Now it was time to play some records. By this time it was, frankly, very hard to suspend disbelief as I took the tiny – it is little larger than a box of matches – power supply in my hand, plugged one end into a figure of eight mains connector, and pushed the jack plug on the end of its captive lead into the Alexia. So tiny. So insubstantial. So counter-intuitive.

This will just be an embarrassment, I was thinking to myself.

As I happened, the embarrassment was all mine. Bear in mind that the turntable was the only element of my system changed for this review. Amplification chain, speakers, cables, interconnects, cartridge, tone arm – all remained as before.

What I heard was new insights into very familiar material. The Alexia was not just allowing my system to deliver deeper layers of detail, but also highlighting the differences between recordings. Compared to the Voyd, it delivered blacker silences, and had a markedly more open and airy presentation, with a dryer yet still detailed bottom end. Good recordings sounded better than I had previously heard them while the poor ones were revealed to be worse than I had thought. The Alexia was not papering over the cracks, so to speak, but was extracting much more detail than the Voyd, and presenting it, warts, frown lines and all.

I played Vivaldi’s Gloria in D Major, recorded at Christ Church, Oxford (Florilegium DSLO554), a recording I love for its sense of place with a strong acoustic, and for the knock-out sound of the Cathedral’s own choir. Alexia showed it to indeed be a benchmark recording, throwing a truly massive, rich and highly detailed soundscape between and way behind my speakers, reproducing a cavernous acoustic and the deeply complex organism that is a top-flight choir at full chat. In the quieter passages soloists Emma Kirkby, Judith Nelson and Carolyn Watkinson were portrayed with detail and clarity.

On Decca’s SXDL7522, Dorati conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Dvorak’s Czech Suite, the strings left and right of the conductor were more vividly and individually drawn than I have heard before, and in the finale the broad dynamic swings were fast-paced and very convincing.

Alexia handled piano with aplomb, my ears able to detect higher pitch stability than the Voyd is able to deliver in a range of material, including the Suk Trio’s recording of Smetana’s Piano Trio in G Minor (Supraphon SUAST50863) where Alexia’s openness made the intimate interplay between piano, cello and violin particularly vivid and lifelike.

And finally, on the 1986 Stanley Clarke solo album Hideaway (EPC26964) and the opening track to side two, Old Friends, Clarke’s (I presume Alembic) bass was drawn in space between the speakers with more tonal complexity than I had heard before, and with the intent behind his playing revealed faithfully by Alexia’s apparently impeccable drive and timing.

I have highlighted these four recordings because for me, the way Alexia dealt with them illustrates her overarching qualities. She is astonishingly, ruthlessly revealing and detailed and on good recordings gives performers an uncanny, almost three dimensional quality within the sound stage. However, I did feel that the presentation tended towards the lean side, at least with my combination of arm and cartridge, and for my tastes I’d have preferred a little more warmth and weight, particularly at the bottom end.

Owen reckons that the Voyd is – or was – a great design for its time. But it ultimately suffers from some fundamental flaws, among them using an (in comparison to Alexia’s damped sub chassis) rather flimsy tube to couple tone arm to platter, with all that such an arrangement implies for sonic impurity. Am I so used to a vinyl sound fattened and extended by turntable elements that sing along with the music that the Alexia’s ruthless veracity takes some getting used to? I think that’s entirely likely.

The pleasure many audiophiles derive from the hobby lies in the mixing and matching of disparate components in pursuit of a singular goal: that of achieving a hybrid system that most closely aligns with their own individual prejudice. Some want accuracy, some want musicality. And some want startling slam and sparkle that makes the supper guests jump out of their skins.

My personal view of Alexia is that many will love her for her plain speaking, while some will yearn for an Alexia with a little more powder on her face to soften and sweeten what is an almost HD-like resolution. I feel she will be particularly at home with detail junkies – and let’s face it, there are a lot of us out there – and also those audiophiles seeking to bring some zip and bite to their otherwise rather laid-back systems.

However, and whatever one’s reaction is upon a first meeting Alexia, there is no denying that Owen’s radical turntable is a game-changer in terms of the technology she deploys. Alexia is also a democrat. At a shade over 3k UK pounds, she’s not exactly a turntable for the masses, but she certainly brings high resolution analogue within reach of many more of us than before.


-ends-

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Product Weakness:	Excruciating honesty of playback may not be to all tastes.
Product Strengths:	Resolution, absence of colouration

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Associated Equipment for this Review:

Amplifier:	Audio Note P4s
Preamplifier (or None if Integrated):	Audio Note S3 step-up + M5 Phono pre-amp
Sources (CDP/Turntable):	Helius Designs Alexia, silver-wired Omega arm, AN IO II cartridge
Speakers:	Audio Note ANE SEC Silver
Cables/Interconnects:	AN
Music Used (Genre/Selections):	Catholic selection
Room Size (LxWxH):	21 x 12.5 x 7
Room Comments/Treatments:	Usual soft furnishings
Time Period/Length of Audition:	One week
Other (Power Conditioner etc.):	Russ Andrews
Type of Audition/Review:	Home Audition

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