Lloyd Walker Interview
Let's begin with some history - how did you get started in audio?
Well, back in 1976, I had a stereo that I carried from job to job. One night we were partying in Wilmington/NC and a friend of mine took me up to see a real high-end audio system. I just couldn't believe it. It was a McIntosh setup. I 'd never seen -- much less heard -- anything like it. The next morning, I threw away my stereo, grabbed a fistful of change and headed for the high-end shop. I had no idea that the high-end even existed and I also didn't have any idea of what the man was talking about. Another friend and I then researched audio for 3 months before we bought our systems - and we bought identical systems. They were shipped to us at a job in Duluth/Minnesota and when they arrived, we set up my new rig. It sounded really good. We had bought identical systems - except for the turntable. I'd gotten fascinated by a manual AR turntable and spent $64 on it. He spent $2,500 for an automatic turntable.
It had to have been the most expensive turntable in the world then.
At that time it was, yes. He now went upstairs to his apartment and set up his system. A few hours later, he came back down and said, "Something is wrong." It didn't sound like mine. After that, we toted every goddamn bit of my equipment upstairs and put it in his system. It sounded no different. The last thing we changed was the AR turntable. That was it. And so he bought one too.

After that, I just had to find out why the cheaper AR sounded better. Over the years, I modified that turntable until you couldn't even recognize it. Later on, I had a modified linear tracker, Sonys and then I bought the big AR turntable and modified it and thought I had the best there was.
But this was way back, when people were not attributing sound to turntables. This was in the mid-70s, no?
Well, what with the AR and my friend, that was 1976. But when I finally ended up moving here to Pennsylvania, probably about 17 years ago, I still had the big AR turntable mounted on the wall mount - special Alphason arm, silver arm wires, with the Merle mods done and the lead platter, clamps and the outer ring clamp. I saw an air-bearing Maplenoll for sale one day and decided to buy it. It sounded like something interesting that I might as well find out about. So, I forked over $500 for it and when I got it, it turned out to be the biggest piece of junk I'd ever seen.
Now, you were not in the audio indudstry yet. What industry were you in at that point?
I was still a Controls Engineer. I did nuclear power, chemical plants, you name it. Anyway, when I got the table, I was really disappointed but I put a $30 cartridge on it.
You were disappointed at the build quality?
Absolutely. It looked like a piece of crap. And then I put a cartridge on it, set it on the coffee table, plugged it in and it proceeded to stomp the living piss out of my $5,000 completely modified turntable. So, I redesigned and modified the Maplenoll and Bob Dilger heard about it. I got to talking with him. He came over a little later on and in fact bought that table from me and I bought his Apollo and reworked it. Short story short, I was going to be his distributor but he fell on hard times before I could do much with it and he went out of business. To this day, I have no idea of what happened to Bob Dilger.

So yes, the Maplenoll did influence me by virtue of being an air-bearing design. Is mine a copy of it? No, it's nowhere close. Not one piece fits or even comes close to fitting although it does look somewhat similar to it, you know - but so does the Forsell or any of the other turntables.

OK, so you are still not in the audio industry per se. It is a passion, a hobby and you seem to focus on turntables. But now, Maplenoll is out of business and no longer a viable company.
Three or four years after they vacated the market, I decided to design my own table. That's when I met my partner Fred on a job. I proposed we go into business together and he agreed. Since I was a controls engineer, I could design both the electronics and pneumatics to perfect the air-bearing arm, the air-bearing platter, the automatic air suspension and the air supply. The air supply is one of the things quite often overlooked, you know? You've got to have it right and dry. It has to be moisture free - that's where air-bearing turntables got a bad name.

Why? Why is moisture the killer?
Well, when you compress air, it gets hot and expands. When it cools down, it cannot hold moisture, which condensates out and gets trapped in the arm and the arm stops - so that's a critical issue. And the damping of the air supply too is extremely critical. You must eliminate the pulses from the pump. One thing I discovered right away? I did not like vacuum hold-downs because you are placing the vacuum with the air supply pulses from the pump right beneath the platter where the needle and the record interface with one another. If you have even the slightest air leak, that will create ultrasonic noise right at the record and negatively effect on the sound.

Many feel that vacuum hold-down is the most effective clamping system yet. The vacuum essentially fuses the record to the platter - yet you are against it.
I am against it. You also push and fuse the dirt on the platter right up into the grooves. The noise from the pump plus any noise from vacuum leaks destroys the sound. To create a vacuum, you must restrict the inlet on the compressor. That produces your vacuum. Now, we've spent thousands of dollars on controlling the pulses on the pressure side to create a nice, smooth, non-pulsating air supply for the arm and the platter. Now hook up a vacuum on the other side of it - you gotta treat it the same way. You need to regulate it and you need a volume of vacuum. You need to remove the pulses of the pump and create a perfect seal for the record. I'll give you an example of a vacuum leak. Have you ever driven down the freeway at about 70 miles an hour and something was irritating you but you didn't know what it was and couldn't put your finger on it? Then you reach over and hit the 'up' on a window and all of a sudden, it's quiet inside the car - that's a vacuum leak. It's audible in the ultrasonic region. You can't put your finger on it and say "I have a window air leak". If you have but a tiny leak between your platter and your seal, then that same ultrasonic noise is fed right to your cartridge and platter and just plays havoc with your music.

Therefore from your perspective, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages on the vacuum?
Exactly. I've gone down the vacuum route and was somewhat happy with it but we had to do extensive modifications to damping, regulation and volume to get it to work properly - which in turn, required a larger compressor, which then gave you further problems with controlling the pulses, to say nothing of running the cost up. To do it right, it would probably have to cost 2.5 times what the perfectly functioning air supply does. It would require an expensive seal for the platter and you would still have potential noise problems – not worth it.

I discovered so many problems with vacuums that it's far better to do it the way we did with our platter. Our platter is machined a little smaller in diameter than a record. That is because the lead-in grooves on a record are thicker so we let them hang over the side. The platter is machined to be flat to within 1/1000th of an inch and the record label area is machined out wider and deeper than the record.