A studio-builder’s workshop in Westphalia.

Sperling Audio is a small German turntable maker based in Welver, a municipality in the Soest district of North Rhine-Westphalia. Its legal notice names the business as Medientechnik Sperling, run by the engineer Ansgar Sperling, and the company describes him as its owner and founder. He trained as a radio and television technician, went on to study engineering, and has worked as a broadcast technician since 1990, building studios across Germany, the company says. His partner in development is the engineer Michael Bönninghoff, a former colleague from that studio work, whom the company credits with valve preamplifiers, power amplifiers and digital-to-analogue converters for other audiophile projects. The German magazine fairaudio, reporting from the High End show in 2014, described the pair as the company’s developers and heads, and placed them in “Westphalian Soest” — loosely, since the company’s own address is in neighbouring Welver.

The company has not published a founding year, and we did not find one in the sources we checked. Its own history, signed by Ansgar Sperling in Welver in April 2013, says the work began “several years ago” with a motor rather than a turntable. Unhappy with the drives they had, the two set out to build their own, guided by the idea of feeding the platter only the minimum energy it loses to friction in the bearing and at the stylus, and coupling motor and platter with a special drive tape. Prototypes handed to friends brought requests to buy, and the motor went into small-series production. The earliest archived copy of the website, from June 2013, introduces “our high-mass turntable and the Sperling-Audio precision motors.” An older company domain, motordose.de, takes its name from the German word for the motor housing.

The L-1 and the high-mass family.

The turntable came next. The company’s history says it presented its heavyweight deck, the L-1, at the High End show in Munich from 9 to 12 May 2013, and The Absolute Sound, reporting from the 2014 show, confirmed that it had been introduced there the year before. Its writer said the L-1, at about $34,000, was “producing some of the best sounds of the show.” The company says the L-1 weighs 50 to 60 kg depending on finish. A massive aluminium base carries two tonearm bases for arms from 9 to 12 inches; they rotate so that each arm can be set at any distance and angle from the platter, and they carry a scale so that an arm can be removed and later refitted in exactly the same place. The arm bases and the coupling between record and platter can be tuned with inserts of wood, Portuguese slate, acrylic or POM, and the M-2 motor housing lets the owner change belt tension while the deck is running. fairaudio called the multi-part arm-mounting plate patented; we did not check the patent.

A smaller L-2, shown in 2014 at €26,180 according to fairaudio, sandwiches a veneered wood layer between two aluminium carriers, takes arms up to 13.5 inches and adds two deflection pulleys that change how far the belt wraps around the platter. The L-3 hides its bearing and most of its platter inside a body turned from solid aluminium. The newest, the L-5, weighs about 30 kg and has a single arm base. Sperling also sells its drives on their own — motor housings and power supplies under names such as M-1, MR-1 and NRM-1 — along with a level-difference meter, the PDM-1, and a tonearm, the TA-1, for which its website promises details “soon.”

On manufacturing, the company says all its devices are made by hand in Germany and that all turning and milling is carried out by German firms in Germany, a wording that indicates the machining is done by outside suppliers rather than in its own workshop.

Design and documentation.

The turntable makers in this guide span more than a century. The oldest name is Garrard: Wikipedia says its engineering company was formed in 1915 and moved to Swindon in 1919, and that its 401 turntable was used by the BBC. Since 2018 the brand has belonged to the owners of SME, and Garrard’s website says each revived 301 is rebuilt from an original drive at SME’s works in Steyning, West Sussex.

The other British maker is younger. Vertere is run from north-west London by Roksan co-founder Touraj Moghaddam; its company was registered in 2006, and Hi-Fi News reported that its first turntables followed in 2013.

Two makers share a city: Ljubljana, in Slovenia. Holbo, Boštjan Holc’s air-bearing turntable, debuted at a Ljubljana hi-fi show in 2017, HighFidelity reported. Pear Audio trades there as Pear Audio Europe d.o.o.; AnalogPlanet reported in 2014 that its designs grew from Peter Mezek’s work with the late Tom Fletcher of Nottingham Analogue.

In Germany, Sperling Audio is Ansgar Sperling’s business at Welver, in North Rhine-Westphalia; it showed its first high-mass turntable at the High End show in Munich in 2013 and says its products are made by hand in Germany.

Australasia supplies the rest. Wand comes from Design Build Listen Ltd, incorporated in New Zealand in 2004, which says its products are handmade there; Dohmann Audio, Mark Dohmann’s company, is based in Melbourne and says every product is made in Australia.

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.

A hard-coupled belt, with a pulley from Jena.

The most detailed independent look at the brand is a July 2026 test of the L-5 by Holger Barske in the German magazine LP, which priced the deck at about €19,750. Barske explained the central idea: Ansgar Sperling uses a belt with almost no stretch, so that the motor reacts at once when the bearing and the stylus brake the platter. The price of that stiffness is that motor vibration can travel straight to the platter, so Sperling relies on mass — a platter 95 mm thick on the L-5, against 120 mm on the L-1 — and on precision. LP reported that the motor pulley is shrink-fitted to the shaft, ground to very tight tolerances and made by the prototype-construction department of Carl Zeiss in Jena. The drive is a low-vibration DC motor run without speed feedback, so it needs a warm-up before fine adjustment with 20-turn potentiometers on the revised NRM-2 controller. A fourth spike under the bearing, separate from the three feet, drains vibration, and Barske found that its pressure changed the sound markedly. His verdict was that the L-5 belongs among the “super-drives.”

The brand also keeps a steady presence at German analogue events. hifistatement lists Sperling Audio among the exhibitors at the Analog Forum in Krefeld from 2014 to 2017, and the 2019 programme included a talk with Ansgar Sperling. The two founding principles printed on its website are “Music is everything” and “Thoughts are free.”

For a design guide, Sperling Audio shows how a small engineering workshop can build a visual identity from machined aluminium, interchangeable wood and slate, and scale markings made for repeatable set-up rather than decoration. Compare Brinkmann, another German high-mass specialist, and Transrotor. For this guide we use brushed aluminium, slate grey and a warm wenge brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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