Tracking Angle, Michell Gyro SE Turntable
A Classic Revisited

The last time I checked in on a Michell turntable was back in 2000 with a review of the GyroDec SE. It’s time for another review don’t you think? This time it’s the Gyro SE. The basic design strategy remains the same (though the original’s Pabst A.C. motor has been replaced with a D.C. motor), so the big questions are: has the company maintained the high quality of the one reviewed twenty three years ago? And does the performance still hold up when inserted into a system vastly superior to the one back then? The “SE” stands for “spider edition”, that is, instead of resting on a large acrylic base, the SE sits on a compact three point “spider”.

In case you don’t know the history of this storied company: Michell Engineering founder John Michell passed away in 2003 but not before establishing a chain of succession that kept Michell a family business. The company known as J A Michell Engineering began in 1973 as a contract-work based engineering organization. In that capacity, Michell built early versions of Transcriptors Hydraulic Reference turntables designed by the late David Gammon, seen in “A Clockwork Orange” and in other films and as a work of art in museums. The Hydraulic Reference’s looks still get people ga-ga, but other than visual cool, I can’t think of one good aspect of floating a record on six points and leaving it to resonate rather than damping it against a full contact platter.

Like SME’s Alistair Robert-Aikman, John Michell was into building scale models, one of which was the space ship Discovery used in another Kubrick film, “2001 A Space Odyssey”. But enough about side endeavors and company history. Today’s J.A. Michell builds various iterations of the classic three spring suspended chassis design including multiple Gyro SE variants…..