Radical design along with superb musicality make WTL a real ‘high-end’ turntable happy to compete with the big boys.

William Firebaugh is the founder of Well Tempered Lab. He is a music lover who also happens to be a fine engineer who worked with Ford Aerospace in the moonshot days, and has been designing hifi equipment for decades.

His early designs for a tonearm and turntable was inspired by a paper presented to The AES by Pol Lodegaard which examined the resonances at work in record players – Firebaugh designed directly addressing Lodegaard’s findings.

The result? Turntables which were remarkable for their integrity and stability of sound. Introduced in the 1970s, production continued essentially unchanged for some three decades.

William formed a new partnership with Denco Audio of New Zealand early in the 21st century and they’ve jointly designed and produced a new range of turntables based on the principles of the earlier series. Indeed, many aspects were dramatically simplified such is the quality of William’s engineering, meaning the products performed well ahead of their many peers.

WTL’s turntables range from the stripped down Simplex through to the massive Royale with its 16 inch tonearm.