U-Turn Audio Returns To Origins With New Orbit Turntable

Launching a crowdfunded product is one thing, but what happens after it successfully ships? While it’s certainly possible for inventors to transition to successful company executives, say in the case of Brooklinen, Peloton and Oura Ring, the list is relatively small.

After 12 years in business, U-Turn Audio is moving into a new phase, releasing a new model of the original Orbit turntable that launched the company in 2012. This week, U-Turn founders Bob Hertig and Ben Carter told Paste after creating an affordable, high-quality turntable in the Orbit, they wanted to offer a refined version, created from the ground up with locally sourced natural hardwood plinth, custom-made components like the one-piece magnesium armtube, and an ultra-quiet motor with electronic speed control.

Critically lauded upon its release late last year, the Orbit Theory turntable is the piece of hi-fi audio equipment Carter and Hertig and co-founder Pete Maltzan are hoping takes them to the next level. When the trio first launched the company via Kickstarter in 2012, the idea of crowdfunding was still relatively new, but the Orbit became the 30th best funded product at the time. Having little experience creating a turntable, let alone starting a company, the team scrambled to find a space in Woburn, Mass. and spent the next two years fulfilling orders and learning how to run a business.

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“So that was a 10-year process. I think it’s pretty dialed in now,” Carter told Paste. “Before Theory, our platter hadn’t changed in eight years, so we added the grooved platter, all the tonearms are built by hand and tested by hand and installed, and our wood plinths here, oak, walnut and ebonized oak, all done by local suppliers. We wanted to design it as a product to be manufactured as opposed to something that we’re like building in our basement”

The engineer of the team, Hertig told Paste the Orbit Theory can be customized 1,500 different ways by selecting a wide range of colors, platters and needles, including Grado from Brooklyn, Ortofon in Denmark and Audio Technica in Japan. While the company does a small amount of wholesale, a majority of the 180,000 turntables they’ve shipped have gone directly to consumers via their website.

In addition to turntables, U-Turn has also developed its own pre-amps and speakers over time. Initially offering third-party products, Carter said they designed and now manufacture built-in pre-amps and speakers specifically made for the turntables.

“What’s cool about those is that it’s a fully analog signal path as opposed to a lot of powered speakers where there’s going to be some sort of signal processing, and there’s not,” Carter said. “So you get that pure analog signal from the turntable through it. It has Bluetooth also because our target demographic is people like us, 30-40 somethings, live near major cities, live in apartments.”

When they redesigned the motor for the Theory, U-Turn engineers created a flexible two-part mount which was then tuned to a certain frequency to keep out motor noise. Hertig said they also wanted to create a better tonearm, opting for a molded single piece of magnesium. Built with a high-tech tool created by Philips Metasize, the innovative arm is rigid and lighter than aluminum and similar to carbon fiber.

Over the last decade, the market for affordable turntables has become a bit more crowded while the rising prices of components has made things even more competitive. Looking back, Carter said if he had to start the company today, he’d likely give up. But, he said, that time spent developing their products has led to new innovations including their speed control board, which is actually a microcontroller, loaded up with a program that U-Turn engineers developed to sense the motor speed and adjust to the demands thousands of times per second.

When developing their pre-amp, the team took inspiration from the notorious Audio Technica AT-LP120, which has a preamp that can’t be switched off to the point where people rip it out.

“Not only did we take the same circuit that’s in our separate Pluto Fluid preamp, but we made it completely bypassable, and you can actually see the switch here,” Hertig said. “This one switch controls eight different poles. So it’s like a train track, switching the signal completely off of the built-in preamp. Not just powering it down, but switching all of the connections, so that when you have it powered off, it’s actually completely electrically separated, isolated from the preamp.”

Since its launch, U-Turn has grown to include 19 other employees, many of whom do the assembly and production at their facility in Woburn. The company is also developing a new, smaller generation of Ethos speakers and a “higher-end” turntable which remains secretive.

“What’s cool is seeing a lot of the people that got the entry-level stuff when we started, now once we’ve introduced Theory and Orbit 2, they’re kind of ready for their upgrades,” Carter said. “It’s such a vote of confidence when someone gets one turntable and when they go to upgrade and then they upgrade with you again.”