VPI Industries turns 40
INSIDER VIEWS ON EVERYTHING VINYL
THIS ISSUE: Mikey listens to VPI’s HW-40 40th Anniversary Edition turntable—and concludes that it’s much better than its twice-as-expensive predecessor.
Judging by VPI’s new HW-40 direct-drive turntable, middle age well suits the company that Harry and Sheila Weisfeld started 40 years ago in their Howard Beach, Long Island, basement.
Harry Weisfeld began his career as an audio manufacturer with the HW-9, an isolation base for Denon’s DP-80 direct-drive turntable. (You could say the introduction of a VPI direct-drive ‘table completes a circle.) Next came the DB-5 “Magic Brick,” a wood-encased block of laminated ferrous metal said to act as a “sink” for stray electromagnetic radiation. Audiophiles around the world bought these and plopped them atop their amplifiers, swearing they heard an improvement. They still do both!
The HW-16 record cleaning machine followed, an improved version of which is still manufactured and sold. For you youngsters out there who don’t remember, the original HW-16 had its velvet-lipped suction channel built into the lid, and there was no water collection tank inside: You gently closed the lid and hoped the distance between the record and the lips produced the correct pressure. Not exactly ideal. The sucked-up fluid just drained into the chipboard box. If you were lucky, it evaporated before it saturated the chipboard and turned it into a soggy mess. No one was that lucky.
VPI, along with a few others, chose to ignore digital and continue making turntables.
But VPI made improvements, and older 16s were upgradeable to the HW-16.5—Art Dudley made the first one and wrote about it in The Absolute Sound, and VPI put it into production—which have the now-familiar spring-loaded, velvet-lipped nozzle as well as an internal catch basin for the vacuumed-up liquid.
VPI introduced its first turntable, the HW-19, in 1981, a year before Sony introduced the CDP-101, the world’s first commercially available CD player: The music business and the high-performance audio industry began its mad
