Origin Live DC Motor Kit

The Listener Magazine, Review by Art Dudley

Let me tell you how I feel about modifying the Linn LP12. First, and with apologies to everyone who knows this already, the Linn is still my favorite turntable. I bought my first one back in 1986 or so, and it improved my system in a way that’s seldom been matched, and never exceeded. That’s why I’m a Linnie. In fact, whenever I hear--or for that matter use--the hoary old cliché about hi-fi products that keep their new owners up all night, pulling record after record off the shelves just to discover what’s really in the grooves, the first product that comes to my mind is the Linn. That probably has something to do with why I’m a record lover.

But like any good marriage, my relationship with my record player has matured: We still have lots of fun, but now we’re just as likely to sit next to one another in companionable silence. Is it possible to re-kindle that passion--to re-discover one’s favorite music--by making a change to the hi-fi?

I don’t know, but I kinda hope so. And that, I suppose, is why I’m an audiophile. The trouble is, most popular tweaks and aftermarket turntable mods stink of a thorough and utter failure to understand how the LP12 works in the first place. Special platter mats, record clamps, damping substances, bearing oils, tonearm cables, arm board screws, and even entirely new platters, subplatters, and subchassis assemblies have come and gone: Some might have been able to help other products, but all of them have sucked out loud on the Linn.

Of the non-Linn products I’ve tried, only Naim’s Armageddon and Pink Triangle’s Pink Link have any merit as enhancers of the LP12’s musical strengths. (I have not had the opportunity to try the Ninja kit from Mana Acoustics, but I hope to.) Those address the turntable’s motor drive and its power supply—so I tend to keep an ear out for new products of that sort. And that interest has led me to a British firm called Origin Live, which specializes in kit-based hi-fi. Actually, this one got off to a bumpy start. An audiopal and fellow LP12 owner told me about the kit in question, and directed me to Origin Live's website (see above). There I found details on a product that seemed close to Pink Triangle's $1400 (but now apparently discontinued) Pink Link: a high-quality, low-voltage DC motor for the Linn and other turntables, offered in combination with a DC power supply centered around a 6V lead-acid battery and automatic charging system. Cool. And then there was the price: Origin Live wants only £250 for theirs in kit form--which at the time of this writing works out to about $400, shipping additional. Very cool.

I sent them an e-mail and got a courteous response telling me what I needed to know, so I took the plunge. And then, right after I sent my traveler's checks to Origin Live (Oneonta doesn’t have any banks big enough to keep British pounds in their safe), the company sent me another e-mail, this time telling me their kit had undergone a modification: The motor and pulley are the same, but now Origin Live has done away with the battery and charger altogether, and replaced them with a simple (regulated) DC power supply.

Not only that: When I received the kit in the mail, I was, I think it's appropriate to say, gobsmacked to find that a chassis or box or whatever is not included. But then I re-visited the Origin Live website and saw that they do in fact mention this, more or less ("Your kit can be installed inside your plinth if it has room or in an external box"--now where is there a turntable whose plinth can accommodate a 6-volt lead acid battery?), so I have only myself to blame.

Well, look: In the interest of seeing my original idea through to its scabby conclusions, I wanted to try Origin Live's power supply as Origin Live had originally intended it. Besides, how else would I know if the new version is really an improvement over the old one? A few e-mails later (thanks, Jim), and the early battery-based model was on its way.

This one had been pre-assembled, but never mind that: I re-did it anyway using a generic Radio Shack circuit board (part number 276-0150), with an eye toward putting all the electronics together in an outboard enclosure. (Sorry, but setting up a Linn is tricky enough without stuffing even more doodads into its already tight working quarters.) During my trip to Radio Shack I also bought one of their plastic kit boxes (part number 270-1809), which is large enough to hold a 6-volt lead-acid battery as well as the circuit board and other miscellaneous bits. And the best part is, there's still room for the off-the-shelf battery charger which is/was a part of the Origin Live package. (The charger looks like a large-ish AC adapter, except that it has a proper AC cord instead of prongs sticking out of its body. Inside is a transformer on a single, all-inclusive circuit board--so I decided to ditch the charger’s cruddy housing altogether and mount its guts inside my Radio Shack box with some machine screws and standoffs.)

A few other touches: I used Velcro to fasten the battery inside the box (I assume it’ll have to be replaced some day), and while I was at the dime store I bought some of those little stick-on rubber feet, too. I also decided to make my Origin Live power supply easily disconnect-able from my turntable, so I went back to Le Shack and bought some shielded two-conductor wire (part number 278-0514) and a threaded disconnect pair (274-0001 is the male and 274-0002 is the chassis-mounted and presumably empowered female). Decals from a model car I never got around to building were the final coup de grace: The plain black box needed the splash of color and the touch of class that only a name like “Viper” (complete with little snake head) can impart. Feel free to improvise.

The motor itself is a pricey little number from Philips—which, it turns out, is the “non-tachogenerator” version of the one used by Pink Triangle in their Anniversary turntable and the aforementioned Pink Link. (Pink’s version of the motor has a rev-counter at the bottom, which is used in a servo loop to monitor and maintain accurate motor speed. I asked Mark Baker of Origin Live about this, and his feeling is that the servo approach is an unnecessary complication.) The motor comes mounted to an aluminum plate with a single screw hole at one end and an adjustment slot at the other. On my sample, the slot looked as if it were made with a nail file, but I have been assured that all new samples are laser cut and much neater and nicer looking. The shaft is topped with a well-machined brass pulley.

As with so many other kits, the instructions leave something to be desired. They consist of one line--"Wire up and solder the board as the schematic diagram shows"--followed by a page of notes. As to the latter, especially chilling portions of the first version included the observation that "the preset variable resistor P1 is oriented in opposite direction to P1." Plus, even in later versions, the schematic diagram still has information left over from this kit's previous incarnation, in that it refers to how switch positions 2 and 3 "disconnect the charger." Yeeeeee!

But it wasn’t hard to put it all together. If you use the circuit board that comes with the Origin Live kit—which looks fiddly, seeing as how you have to create your own breaks in some of the circuit traces, but actually isn’t—you should be able to get the power supply up and running in less than two hours, including the time needed to drill holes in your plastic box (and whatever’s underneath it—whoops!).

Swapping motors is another story, but even that isn’t so hard. On the Linn, you need to remove the platter, prop the turntable up on your Linn setup jig or a quartet of wooden blocks, and remove the bottom plate by unscrewing the four rubber feet. (Better unplug it first!) The motor can be removed without disturbing the suspension at all: Just be careful not to move or stress the tonearm cable when you lift away the bottom. If you’re switching over from an AC motor and supply, there’ll be a ground wire (probably green) attached to one of the main support bolts (probably the front one) with an O-ring. You won’t be needing this in the brave new world of DC, but unthreading the nuts from that bolt (there’s more than one) can disturb things enough that you might have to go through your setup regimen all over again. So to make your life easier, just use your wire cutters. Then, if you revert to AC drive, you can always re-solder it.

Adjusting the mounting plate is a question of guesswork, really. Keep in mind that as you make the drive belt more or less tight, you are changing the frequency above which it filters out noise and vibration—not just from the motor itself, but from everywhere else, since a drive belt in a suspended subchassis turntable tends to act like an extra spring. Pet theories, anyone? I’m open to suggestion—but until I hear a convincing argument for doing it some other way, I would suggest moving the motor further from, rather than closer to, the spindle, in the interest of keeping the belt tight enough that slippage won’t be a problem.

As to the musical performance of the original battery-plus-charger version, it was good but not great—and certainly no better than the (admittedly more expensive) Naim Armageddon. The sound was open and transparent from the lowest musical registers to the highest, and the deepest bass notes had good weight and were clear in pitch. Good tunefulness was evident throughout, in fact—but the music’s sense of drive was a few notches down from the AC motor and Naim supply. Overall musical involvement was a notch down from the Naim, too—although, as I’ve suggested, it wasn’t bad. Apart from the amount of time I had invested, I was satisfied that the Origin Live supply was a good performance value.

Now for the revised version. Pulling the battery from the box was a no-brainer (I’ll bet even George Dub-yah knows how Velcro works), but I also had to yank out the charger and put a new self-contained 6-volt DC power supply in its place. Luckily, the two units are from the same company, and are manufactured using the same size circuit board—so it was an easy swap. Origin Live’s voltage regulation and speed control board—which is the thing you actually have to construct yourself if you opt for the kit version—was different enough that I decided to start over from scratch, rather than make parts substitutions on the old board. But that, God help me, was the fun part.

Let’s pause for a moment and take a look at how this thing works. That self-contained DC supply (a close relative of the wall-warts that power your answering machine, portable CD player, wah-wah pedal, and other household battery hogs) consists of a dinky transformer plus a full wave rectifier. So, yeah: There’s your DC right there--but the voltage still isn’t exactly what you need. You’ve got to do two things: whack it down to the two (switch-selectable) voltages your motor wants--one to get the platter spinning at 33-1/3, the other to get it up to 45--and stabilize it so the motor speed doesn’t drift all over the darn place.

The Origin Live circuit uses a separate pre-regulator and regulator to monitor and stabilize the voltage, plus a few capacitors to help smooth out power irregularities. It also incorporates two pairs of variable resistors for speed control: one pair for 33-1/3, the other for 45. The idea is to use the higher-value resistor in each pair to get the speed approximately right, and then trim the smaller one for fine-tuning. It’s easy as pie to do—especially if you have something like Linn’s stroboscopic speed checker kicking around the house. (The Origin Live instruction sheet has guidelines for people who need to compute turntable speed based on the time it takes the platter to make X number of revolutions. My guess is they’ll try it once, and then call Linn to order that speed checker.)

I don’t know why, but the revised version of the Origin Live supply really does kick sand in its predecessor’s face. The difference is like comparing a Martin D18 guitar built in the mid to late 70s with one from, say, 1938, when they chose good Adirondack spruce for the tops, trimmed and positioned the braces properly, and observed numerous other details from which this guitar weenie will now spare you. The point being: It takes some effort to get music out of the former, but the latter is louder, more dynamic, more tonally complex, and seems to emit note after beautiful note with little more effort than just looking at the thing. The new, non-battery OL supply is like that pre-war Martin.

Try the limited edition LP version of Echo, Tom Petty’s latest—which, by the way, is both a great album and an exceptionally good sounding hunk of vinyl. Echo sounds fine on the Linn/Armageddon, but on the Linn/Viper (sorry)[the "Viper" refers to the Origin Live version - see earlier in the review], instruments and voices emerge from the silence with slightly more presence, and greater apparent loudness relative to the background. The pitches are just as true, but the musical sounds are bigger and more colorful—and, as a consequence, the music impresses me as having more drama, and more emotional impact.

A few days and several album sides later, the OL continues to impress me—although I still think the Armageddon gives music a bit more drive and momentum. But the Origin Live is no slouch, as can be heard on “Waters Part,” from the Cypress album by Let’s Active: From the first cascading guitar line, this song just leaps out of the speakers and gallops along at a brisk—and involving—pace. It was a stirring performance of a song that can also sound flat if your hi-fi doesn’t get it right, and that alone would have been enough to sell me.

But the OL kit brings another bag of chips to the party, and that’s the ability to play 45s at the turn of a knob, without having to dick around with an intransigent motor pulley adapter. You can bet I’ve wallowed in high-speed discs for the past few days, ranging from Classic Records’ brilliantly colored classical reissues to my favorite XTC 12-inchers (and, geez, I didn’t know until now how deep the bass went on their 45 rpm single version of “The Meeting Place”).

Drawbacks? Sure, there’s a few. The three-position selector knob goes from off to 33-1/3 to 45, and that’s it. I wish it were like the Pink Triangle version, where yet another click to the right will turn the thing off again, so you don’t have to go back down through 33-1/3 again. Plus, even in the off position, the internal supply is powered up all the time, and its fiendish red eye never shuts. I could get around to fixing those things myself some day, but I’d have to buy more parts from you-know-what-Shack.

But there’s one lingering problem that can’t be cured with a drive to the mall, and that’s the motor noise. Oh, it isn’t horrible or anything: just a steady “whirring” sound that you don’t hear if you leave the dustcover closed. But if you don’t have a dustcover or if you can’t leave it closed when you play records (people who use “tall” cartridges in their Naim Aro tonearms know about this), and if you happen to sit close to the turntable when you listen to music, it will in fact be audible during quiet passages. Mark Baker acknowledges this, and says he’s working on some sort of a “wrap” for the motor, which may or may not help. We’ll see.

By the way, Origin Live promotes their DC power supply kit as suitable for use with a number of British turntables, not just the Linn: Models from Roksan, Rega, and Systemdek, as well as OL’s own kit turntable, are all said to benefit. The only one about which I’m skeptical is the Roksan, since one of its most important design elements is a precision bearing that’s fastened to the bottom of its motor (for reasons too complex to tackle here). The Philips DC motor supplied by OL would seem to be too tall for this, even if the owner were willing to pry the bearing off the Roksan motor and glue it to the bottom of the new one. Unless you’re a glutton for do-it-yourself punishment, I wouldn’t go there.

But I would encourage the many thousands of Linn LP12 owners out there to take a look at Origin Live’s offerings. Especially if you have an older deck which has never been fitted with an outboard supply, and especially if you enjoy getting involved at this level, the OL kit makes good sense. Based on the value of the parts and ideas that comprise it, it offers decent value for the money…but considered in the context of its pricier competition, its value is nothing short of tremendous. Enthusiastically recommended to people who know which end of a soldering iron not to grab.