Pierre Lurne: Audiomeca’s Turntable Designer

John Atkinson writes:

Someone, I forget who it was, once wrote a perceptive essay on how in any field of human endeavor, apparent perfection is attained only when that field is in the process of being superseded. The Palace at Versailles was built when the power of the French monarchy was well into decline; Wagner's "music of the future" was in fact the end of a particular line of development; the nuvistor was developed almost simultaneously with the silicon transistor which would render tubes almost obsolete; and six years after the commercial introduction of Compact Disc, with record shops increasingly filling up with silver discs, to the detriment of black, turntables exist which render LP playback pretty much on a level with CD technically (many audiophiles, of course, feel that the LP has always been musically ahead).

Linn in Scotland led the way in the '70s, but additional standard-bearers in the CD era have been SOTA, VPI, Well-Tempered Lab, and now Versa Dynamics in the USA, Audiolabor in West Germany, Micro Seiki in Japan, and Goldmund in France. It is widely known that the Goldmund series of turntables, from the Studietto to the incomparably expensive Reference, are the result of the activities of one Michel Reverchon; what is less well-known is that the technopreneurial Monsieur Reverchon has made use of the skills of a number of engineers, one such being Pierre Lurne.

http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/pierre_lurne_audiomecas_turntable_designer/index.html

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