TW Acustic Raven AC-3 Turntable

Musicality Incarnate

Alongside the $40,000 Walker Black Diamond record player, the $18,000 TW Acustic Raven AC-3 turntable with $4300 Graham Phantom tonearm is the best source component I’ve auditioned—and far and away the most voluptuous sounding. Indeed, equipped with the Clearaudio Goldfinger v2 or Air Tight PC-1 moving-coil cartridge, the Raven/Graham has a lifelike density of tone color and delicacy of dynamic nuance the likes of which I’ve never heard from vinyl (and certainly not from digital).

Like the Walker Black Diamond or the Magico Mini, the AC-3 is the work of a greatly gifted individual, Thomas Woschnick, a German music lover and analog enthusiast who, dissatisfied with what was on the market, decided to build an uncompromised and uncompromising ’table of his own. Woschnick is one of those supremely talented tinkerers who searches ceaselessly for ways to improve just about everything that comes his way. This is a guy who spent half a decade developing just the right mix of Delrin, copper powder, and other proprietary ingredients to make the jet-black compound he uses in the Raven AC-3’s beautiful plinth and platter (which, BTW, are more immune to floor-borne and air-borne vibration than those of any other ’table I’ve tried). Still not satisfied, he then hollowed out that platter, filled it with a “special liquid” (actually a gel) and screwed a thick plate of solid copper1 on top to achieve the perfect rotational balance and mass for his hand-tooled stainless-steel bearing. This is a guy who went through thousands of formulations of elastometric materials to find the one with just the right blend of stickiness, elasticity, and durability to make the ideal turntable belt, and then took the highest-precision DC motors made by Pabst of Germany and rebuilt them with his own electromagnetic engines (so successfully, BTW, that, up until recently, TW Acustic was supplying other boutique turntable manufacturers with its rebuilt motors). This is a guy who believes, almost literally, that the sound of a turntable is the symphony of its parts.

The Raven AC-3 is, indeed, a marvel of engineering, craftsmanship, and imagination. The gorgeous, unsuspended, seventy-pound plinth, the twenty-two-pound gel-filled platter inlaid with its copper top-plate, the stainless-steel bearing plate and bearing shaft on which the platter spins are all milled by hand to tolerances of less than 1/100th of a millimeter. Other parts—like the bronze armboards and stainless-steel armboard mounts at the corners of the plinth (yes, you can mount up to four tonearms on the Raven AC-3, though the entire ’table must be tweaked at the factory by Woschnick to accommodate the extra weight)—are also handmade to the same extraordinary tolerances. Indeed, there is very little of the Raven AC-3 that Woschnick doesn’t design and build for himself.

The Raven AC-3 is, as noted, driven by three, free-standing, high-torque DC motors (thus the “3” in “AC-3”), sourced from Pabst, modified by Woschnick, and synchronized by Woschnick’s own superb microprocessor-based motor-controller, which is claimed to have a timing error of less than two nanoseconds per minute. Woschnick’s single precision-made belt, ground to 1/100th of a millimeter in thickness, runs around the circumference of the platter via pulleys on each of the motors that are themselves ground to within 1/200th of a millimeter in diameter. Where some multiple-motor ’tables, like the Kuzma Stabi XL that I reviewed in Issue 167, use separate belts to distribute centrifugal and centripetal forces around the bearing, Woschnick uses one. Why? Because, says he, “I’ve tried everything, and it simply sounds better that way.”

Assembling the ’table is a snap. So are leveling it, thanks to the three adjustable Stillpoint feet attached to the base of the plinth, and setting rotation speeds.2 My unit also came with a carbon-fiber Millennium- M mat. You don’t have to use the mat—you can lift it off and put records directly on the platter’s varnished copper top-plate—but I thought the sound was marginally better with the Millennium- M. Oddly enough, the Raven AC-3 did not come with a record-clamp. Although Woschnick doesn’t discourage use of same, it is clear that he (and U.S. importer Jeff Catalano) think that clamps add mass (and, hence, colorations) of their own. After some experimentation, most of my listening was done without one and, to be honest, I thought the Raven AC-3 performed better this way.

As for the sound of the TW Acustic Raven AC- 3, it seems that Woschnick’s idea was to combine the virtues of direct-drive ’tables (speed accuracy, dynamics) with those of belt-drive ’tables (low noise, timbre, bloom) to bring the experience of listening to recorded music one step closer to that of listening to live music. (See the interview with Woschnick on the previous page.) Of course, everyone in the high end worth his salt claims that he wants to move his products closer to the absolute sound, the difference being that Woschnick has succeeded. In the critical area of duration—in music, how long a note is sounded—his TW Acustic Raven AC-3 does, indeed, break entirely new ground.