The Dark Lantern

A Brief History And Some Insights

David Leo (Dave) Whittaker started building his Aura Turntable in Auckland, New Zealand in 1984. He wanted to successfully build an audiophile quality record player and, being an avid experimenter, he wanted it to be versatile, easy to use and to be able to easily accommodate more than one tonearm and cartridge.

The initial Aura concept ...

"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess." - Oscar Wilde

Hanoi, Vietnam… Capital city of communist North Vietnam and now capital of modern Vietnam. One of the fastest growing cities in the world they say, so why didn’t I expect to find high-end hifi in Hanoi?

Strolling back from Quan An Ngon, the famous restaurant on the outskirts of Hanoi’s ...

"Music is art, theatre is life, film is icon, television is furniture. "

Sometimes you become jaded. I get blasé often about new ‘mainstream’ album releases. Grammy Awards frequently do nothing to encourage one to discover innovative music. So I was approaching 2007 released ‘Raising Sand’ with some hesitation. All my audio pals already owned this ...

"You can measure all you want, but a mass spectrometer isn't going to find a lot of difference between lunch at a high school cafeteria and the best dinner at a four-star restaurant." - Lynn Olson, ‘The Sound of the Machine’ orig published in Glass Audio.

Vinyl record playback is impressive. Tiny voltages are generated at the stylus-groove interface by the miniscule movements ...

"Experts… people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing."

Linear tracking tonearm deliberations have taken a back seat while sort out a few problems with my current pivoted tonearm. In the process, I find myself reconsidering some of the many aspects that allow a tonearm to work well, or not.

First some history…a ...