Thorens New Reference

The Thorens New Reference is the result of our strive for the perfect rendition of music recordings. The electrical signals in a turntable are created by mechanical vibrations of the stylus of the cartridge while it moves along the grooves of a vinyl record. These vibrations are converted into the sound.

In exactly the same way, all other mechanical vibrations of the turntable are processed and lead to distortion and other unwanted effects. The sources of these vibrations are for example building vibrations, people walking around, the sound waves of the music and self-generated vibrations from the turntable itself. Since it is not possible to distinguish between the actual music vibrations and parasitic disturbances, these must be avoided as much as possible.

The Thorens design team around Helmut Thiele, who is responsible for the construction and design of the new Reference, have taken on this challenge.

With the Thorens New References, for the first time ever a turntable is designed and optimized from scratch together with a fully active vibration isolation system. Thorens teamed up with the German company Seismion, which is internationally renowned for its class-leading active vibration isolators, to create a turntable, that is designed around the vibration isolation system as an integral part of the system. Seismion fully exploited its expertise in active isolation systems used for semiconductor industry, nanotechnology and scientific laboratories, to create a vibration isolation never seen and experienced in turntables before.

Drive unit with innovative platter absolute-velocity-damping by Seismion

The Thorens New Reference features an innovative and highly effective active damping system by Seismion. The deep knowledge and experience with sky-hook-damping systems featured in the active vibration isolator “Reactio” are used for the all new active damping approach of the platter.

Colour finishes / equipment

The Thorens New Reference can be equipped with up to 3 tonearm bases and can accommodate tonearms of 9", 10", and 12" inches. In addition to the newly developed TP160 cutting bearing tonearm with a length of 12" inches and continuous silver cabling, the Thiele TA01 tonearm is also used.