Upgrade Platter Mat

A brand new affordable platter mat to radically improve the sound of your records

The unique Origin Live "upgrade" mat acts as the critical interface between your vinyl records and turntable.

Experimentation with different mats are simple and quick. The sound differences are usually obvious , even if your deck does not have a mat.

Users find that the "upgrade" mat makes a far greater difference than most mats but more importantly it is a positive difference to every aspect of the music.

Bringing Music alive: - The new mat will greatly enhance your level of enjoyment due to the way it brings recordings alive. Music becomes far better integrated and more natural. In particular bass is solid and keeps time with the rest of the music - too often one hears slow bass that lacks attack, and has an overhang which muddies the rest of the music.

Not only this but the mat produces bass extension of maybe an extra octave. This new dimension of speed and air is not limited to the bass regions but extends right through the frequency range. The key words to summarise the differences this mat makes are - natural, dynamic and transparent.

Tone from a Mat
The other week, I attended 2 live music performances given by entirely different groups. It was interesting that in the first, a violinist added superbly to a non classical band - the leader remarked afterwards "she has amazing tone". Later that week an Orchestra conductor was introducing a lead cornet player doing a solo and remarked "he has superb tone". After listening to the first few notes I could understand what he meant. It was the sort of rendition that was so noticably pleasurable to the ear that you wanted to keep listening. Another player, playing the same instrument may be technicaly brilliant, hit all the right notes but just not be that pleasant to listen to.

This provoked a lot of thought on the similarities of "tone" in hi fi equipment. It has to do with that indefinable "something" that measurements don't really have much hope of capturing. Some may claim to have the answers, but the truth is usually far more complex. The point of this story is that every material in the hi fi replay chain has a tone and some are far superior to others. The material you use to support the actual playing surface in vinyl is probably one of the most important.

THE FUNCTION OF A PLATTER MAT
A great platter mat has 3 functions which are very tricky to reconcile.

To decouple the record from vibration entering it via the turntable - this includes bearing noise, transmitted motor noise through the drive system, cartridge feedback "chatter" transmitted via the tonearm into the deck, groundbourne/ airbourne audio feedback, underground pumps etc.

To absorb and transmit resonance out of the record itself. It is hard to imagine the microscopic levels that a hi fi cartridge functions at. The truth is, that a stylus vibrating in a record groove sets the vinyl resonating in a way that will feedback into the stylus if not highly controlled. This feedback may be momentary to the tiniest fraction of a second but will nonetheless create blurring of the signal and overlay other parts so that they will not be heard. In other words there can be loss of information and addition of spurious noise to the intended signal. A good platter mat can do a great deal to eliminate these problems.

To transmit the drive to the record without elasticity or slip Unlikely as it may seem, the surface that the record sits on responds very slightly to the amount of drag on the record. At best, this will be a very slight momentary elastic movement backwards, but enough to slightly deaden the impact of a bass note drum strike for example. At worst it will cause the record to slip backwards - this is only blatently obvious when you can hear wow occuring, as in the case of a badly dished record, that only contacts the platter in the centre.

Why a new mat?
Over a year ago we introduced a semi rigid mat that we called the "performance mat". Feedback on this mat was almost universaly positive with users reporting superior performance over recognised market leaders that they already owned.

Further experimantation led to a new flexible composite material which sounded even better. Not just a bit better but a lot better. To be fair the new flexible mat (which we are calling the "upgrade" mat) does most things that the "performance" mat does, only it does them better - especially in the bass area. However the 2 mats can complement each other and the semi-rigid performance mat does add a touch of additional transparency to the flexible upgrade mat.

To quote from the first user of the flexible upgrade mat

"Unbelievable difference, thought the Resolution turntable sounded good before, much better in every way than my Primare CD31 cd player, and infinitely better than other turntables I have owned.

After fitting it with Siver tonearm and a Dynavector 20 cartridge and now have added your new mat, I cannot stop listening to Vinyl.

The mat has improved all areas of the sound, most noticeable are the increase in soundstage, front to back mainly, the start and decay of instruments being played are also improved, detail is better, backing vocals that were audible before are now easier to follow, as are the lyrics of the main vocals.

But the largest improvement is the Bass performance, all notes are much clearer and the extension better, it has improved the timing of the music areas also which makes the musical message much more obvious, these are areas I was already more than happy with!

Surface noise is also reduced, which has resulted in more fine detail being heard, without those details being brought too far forward in the mix.

The Improvements in my system are amazing, I would have been impressed if this had been an arm upgrade or even a turntable upgrade, just can not get over all I have done is add a mat to it, bearing in mind I was using the turntable without one.

The rest of my system comprises of a Whest Audio 2 box phono stage, Primare I30 amplifier, and Wilson Benesch Actor loudspeakers.

Your brand has totally changed all my cynical thoughts, everything you have helped me with has exceeded my expectations.

The mat however is possibly the biggest improvement I have heard from any upgrade so far.

Thanks as always for your advice.

Rod ( Rob ) Woods

Will it work on your deck?
Finding a mat that works universaly well on all turntables is almost like the quest for the Holy Grail. In over 22 years we have experimented with countless platter mats varying from felt, fiberglass, air gap, various foams, cork, graphite, carbon fiber, acrylic, PVC, MDF, aluminium, rubber, silicon and steel laminates etc. This is to name but a few. Many of these mats yield significant improvements to some areas but have drawbacks in others.

The Origin Live upgrade mat is only 1 mm thick, and so is well within the ability of most tonearm height adjusters. The material mix from which it is manufactured must remain confidential. Diameter is 295mm.