Platter & sub-platter

The heavy aluminium main platter construction utilises advanced thermo plastic elastomers (TPE*) for optimising resonance behaviour.
A drawback for most of the old designs was the platter. Casted platters all have been heavy (which is good for speed constancy and low wow and flutter) but suffered very much from ringing effects which again caused colouration of the sound. The platter of The Classic is precisely machined out of a special aluminium alloy again damped with TPE*, which offers special damping abilities. The subplatter / main bearing construction we use is similar system as on the Debut. It is made of hardened steel / Bronze bushing / Teflon bearing mirror, which results in very smooth low noise running smoothness of the bearing.

The main difference to the Debut bearing are the tolerances which are by factor 10 lower and therefore more precise (0,005%). Especially the subplatter is a very sophisticated part which is accurately machined and guarantees a very good isolation between bearing noise and the platter itself.

New carbon/aluminium tonearm

The radical new designed Classic tonearm is the result of 25 years of experience in mechanical construction. The tonearm tube is made of a sandwich of carbon and aluminium: carbon for stiffness and speed, alu for better damping. The cardan bearing assembly with pin-point zircon bearing provides ultra low friction. A new expensive Japanese base-ball-bearing allows a better lead of the tonearm wire and increases the free movement of the arm.

The counterweight incorporates a TPE* damper which allows us to reduce the amplitude of the tonearm cartridge resonance frequency by 50%. As typical for Pro-Ject and absolutely not standard at that price range we offer also azimuth and VTA adjustment to use a variety of cartridges. Different counterweight for cartridges up to 25 grams are available as an option.

We supply as standard the Ortofon 2M Silver moving magnet cartridge. This Ortofon cartridge is exclusively designed for Pro-Ject Audio Systems. We improved the sound and dynamics of the recognised 2M series, by implementing pure silver coils instead of standard copper. However, as the tonearm offers excellent damping and flexibility as well, its effective mass can be called middle heavy, so it is also a very good partner for MC cartridges.