AXPONA 2025

Hello and welcome to the third installment of my AXPONA show report series. As usual, a number of turntables and other analog products that made their U.S. and/or North American debut at AXPONA 2025. One such big launch — both metaphorically and physically — was that of the Wilson Benesch Prime Meridian turntable system. This new table was on demo in a full-scale reference playback system that also included Wilson Benesch Omnium loudspeakers, which are the second from the top of the company’s Fibonacci series. The W-B playback system was shown in the Utopia D room, a large convention center room with very high ceilings.

WILSON BENESCH
Luke Milnes of Wilson Benesch explained several technical details about that Prime Meridian turntable system as well, some of which I’ll share here. The Prime Meridian system’s parts are manufactured in the UK, including a majority of them being custom-made for Wilson Benesch. Fundamental to the Prime Meridian’s design is the proprietary Omega Drive direct-drive technology that uses 21 coils and 14 magnets. It’s purpose-built to avoid cogging, a common concern among direct-drive motors.

“We have developed this from the ground up,” Milnes told me of the Prime Meridian system’s motor. “We did two grant projects on it, with funding from the British government. How it differs from any other direct-drive motor is that when you’re developing a motor, what you really want, in terms of a common motor, is you want efficiency, so you have the coil and the magnet quite close to one another.”

The objective is to avoid that aforementioned cogging, or any “catching” between the coils and magnets during rotation. This patented design allows the platter to spin freely and maintain speed consistency. It requires a special power supply that incorporates an algorithm to “kick-start” the motor. “It adds a pulse and another pulse, and then once it starts to move and gets up to speed, it locks into synchronicity,” Milnes continued. “After that point, it’s perfectly stable — there’s no variation, there’s no wow, [and] no flutter.”

The plinth structure is integrated with a four-point suspension system for leveling, isolating, and reducing resonances that uses springs. “It’s microprocessor controlled, so if it goes out of level, it corrects within milliseconds,” Milnes added.

The tonearm is the Graviton, a 3-D printed creation that also involved complex engineering — and biomimicry. The result is an organic form factor with tessellated structures resembling honeycombs. Using additive manufacturing, the titanium structure is built layer by layer — welding liquid metal with a laser. Wilson Benesch’s Tessellate Ti series cartridge, a hybrid cantilever design available in three metals (boron, sapphire, and diamond), is — as its name suggests — similarly constructed from titanium applied in a tessellated structure. The structure is intentionally semi-open to avoid microphonic resonances that the cantilever would pick up if it were in within an enclosed structure. A small carbon-fiber “sleeve” element is added to increase stiffness and damping.

Users can also make certain fine-tuning adjustments via a control app. How many other turntables allow you to adjust, say, VTA via your mobile device? And down to nanometers, no less? That’s where the groove’s deeper data is. “You need high-precision systems, so the position of the tonearm in terms of the angle is controlled via a piezo[electric] device,” Milnes explained.

I’d wanted to listen to it all right here in the room, but only had just enough time to finish a related video presentation for our sister site Stereophile. However, I do remember hearing this Prime Meridian turntable system briefly at the High End Munich show in 2024 — more of which you can read about right here, if you so wish — and being impressed. Here’s a comment culled from that report: “Regrettably, I didn’t have time to listen for long, but what I did hear sounded incredibly smooth, and all seemed vivid and intensely — but not artificially — real: intense tonal colors, timbres, [and] leading-edge transients in the music.”

Fidelity Imports recently added Wilson Benesch to their roster for importation and other marketing and distribution-related needs here in the States, and we expect they’ll announce the SRP for this turntable system and more in the near(ish) future.

Part 3 of my AXPONA 2025 show report will be coming soon!

Author bio: Julie Mullins, a lifelong music lover and record collector since age 10 who takes after her audiophile father, is also a contributing editor and reviewer on our sister site, Stereophile, for whom she also writes the monthly Re-Tales column. A former fulltime staffer at Cincinnati’s long-running alt-weekly CityBeat, she programs and hosts a weekly radio show on WAIF called On the Pulse.

For our YouTube Short featuring cool gear from TEAC and Revox at AXPONA 2025, go here.

For Part 1 of Julie Mullins’ AXPONA 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 2 of Julie Mullins’ AXPONA 2025 show report, go here.

For Part 1 of AP editor Mike Mettler’s AXPONA: First Impressions series, go here.

For Part 2 of Mettler’s AXPONA: First Impressions series, go here.

For Part 3 of Mettler’s AXPONA: First Impressions series, go here.

For even more AXPONA 2025 coverage, go here on our sister site Stereophile.