Jochen Räke’s firm in Bergisch Gladbach.

Transrotor is a turntable maker in Bergisch Gladbach, east of Cologne. Its website says it was founded in 1971 by Jochen Räke and is “still in family hands today.” The date is supported independently: in November 2020 Dirk Sommer of hifistatement wrote that the founder would celebrate the 50th anniversary of his firm the following year, and described Räke as designing and building turntables alone at first, and later with a team.

The second generation now leads it. Dirk Räke, Jochen’s son, began sharing the running of the company with his father in the late 2000s — hifistatement said “for eight years” in 2015 and “about a dozen years” in 2020 — and the magazine’s August 2026 review of the Transrotor Scala calls him the managing director who has for some years led the company his father founded. The website’s legal notice names Dirk Räke as the representative of Räke Hifi Vertrieb GmbH, registered at the district court in Cologne. North Data’s summary of the same register number shows the name Transrotor HiFi-Geräte Vertriebs GmbH and lists both Dirk and Jochen Räke as managing directors in a 2016 notice; we could not see when the name changed. The company’s registered object is the import and export of Transrotor turntables and their servicing. The sources we checked show no outside owner.

The company has long counted its owners. In 2003 its website said that “after more than 30 years” there were more than 18,000 satisfied owners of its turntables in Germany alone; we give that as the company’s own figure.

Polished aluminium, acrylic and magnets.

Transrotor’s look is its signature: thick platters and chassis of hand-polished aluminium and acrylic. Reviewing the Scala for hifistatement in 2026, Achim Schneider recalled dreaming in the 1980s of owning a Transrotor Delight, one of Jochen Räke’s “stylish design objects” in aluminium and acrylic, with curved forms and an acrylic tub; in 2015 his colleague Wolfgang Kemper described Räke as a design-minded engineer as well as an audiophile. Sommer adds that the company’s turntables have appeared in many German film and television productions, and Transrotor says of its Fat Bob that many a film production has used it.

The engineering signature is magnetic. The Transrotor Magnetic Drive (TMD), as the company described it in the mid-2000s, splits the hydrodynamic platter bearing horizontally and sets opposing magnets in the two faces, so that the belt turns the lower half and the platter is carried round by the magnetic coupling. Its page quoted German magazines from 2005, including AUDIO, which called it the “invention of the year,” and LP-Magazin, which reported that the coupling halved the flutter in measurement; we have those quotations only through the company. Larger models use the FMD, which the company calls “Free Magnet Drive,” a contactless drive.

The range runs from the Max — named, the company says, after a good friend and for “maximum reduction” — through the Fat Bob S TMD, with a 12kg platter, to the acrylic Tourbillon FMD, a nod to the watchmaker’s complication with three motors, and the Artus FMD, named after King Arthur, a 220kg drive suspended on gimbals and turned by three motors. hifistatement wrote in 2020 that the top Artus and Argos models sold for six-figure sums, and that Dirk Räke installs them for customers around the world. The Scala, a Max with a second arm base for 9- to 12-inch arms, was first shown at the HighEnd 2026 show in Vienna.

Design and documentation.

Beyond the best-known turntable brands sits a group of smaller engineering firms that concentrate on record players, tonearms and the parts around them. They are spread across Europe, Japan and the United States, and each gives its own address on its website.

In Europe, Kuzma gives its address as Kranj, in Slovenia. Three of the makers in this guide are German: Transrotor trades as Räke Hifi Vertrieb GmbH in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne; Acoustic Signature’s website names AS-Distribution GmbH in Süßen; and Dr. Feickert Analogue lists Dr. Christian Feickert at March-Buchheim, near Freiburg. Origin Live, in Southampton, says its products have been “made in Southampton, England since 1986.”

Outside Europe, TechDAS describes itself as the house brand of Stella Inc., a high-end audio distributor in Tokyo, and says all its products are made in Japan. Basis Audio gives its address as Hollis, New Hampshire, and calls its turntables “Hand-Built in the USA.”

Mass features in some of their own descriptions. TechDAS says its Air Force Zero weighs 330 kg, with a platter up to 40 cm across, yet argues that weight alone is not the measure of a record player; Basis offers a 23 lb hybrid alloy “Super Platter” for its Inspiration, while the platter of its 2200 is machined from acrylic.

Where these products are made is, in most cases, the companies’ own statement rather than a fact documented independently.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in Germany, by the company’s account.

For most of its history Transrotor bought its tonearms in. Until 2020, hifistatement reported, the company fitted its turntables with arms from other makers, including Jelco, which made special versions for it. When Jelco stopped making arms at short notice that year, Transrotor introduced its own, the TRA 9, developed by father and son with the design engineer Lars Hornung, who had worked for the firm since at least 2001. The magazine gave the arm its own Statement in High Fidelity award. Cartridges are made with partners rather than in-house: the Figaro with Goldring, and the JR Tamino with My Sonic Lab’s Matsudaira, according to the magazine’s reviews from 2015 and 2016. The current list also includes Konstant motor power supplies and phono stages.

On where the turntables are made, the company is direct: “We manufacture in Germany.” It says development and final assembly take place in Bergisch Gladbach, that the parts it buys in come from a close network of suppliers in the immediate region, that each product is made by hand, and that it keeps spare parts for long periods; it calls “Made in Germany” the core of its brand since 1971. We give those as its claims. Reviewers who have visited the firm describe the same Bergisch Gladbach base and a long-serving team — Sommer wrote in 2020 that staff turnover there seemed not to exist.

For a design guide, Transrotor shows how a material — polished metal and clear or black acrylic — can become a brand’s whole visual language, held steady for half a century by one family. Compare Clearaudio, another German turntable maker, and Brinkmann. For this guide we use polished aluminium, acrylic black and a slate blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Transrotor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.