A jazz drummer who learned turntables at SOTA.

Spiral Groove was a small turntable maker in Berkeley, California, built around one designer, Allen Perkins. A 2024 profile published by the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, where Perkins graduated in 1985, says he co-founded Spiral Groove in 2005 “with a partner.” The review site Dagogo put it more loosely in 2018, saying he co-founded it “with an investor at the turn of the century.” Neither source names the partner. A business directory also lists Spiral Groove LLC of Berkeley as founded in 2005, so we use that year.

Perkins came to turntables sideways. The university’s profile describes a jazz drummer who spent two years in Japan, where he read the audio magazine Stereo Sound in jazz coffee shops, and then took a part-time job at a hi-fi shop in the Twin Cities. At the Consumer Electronics Show he met the makers of a vacuum hold-down turntable he had repaired himself, and in 1985 they offered him a job in Oakland. Dagogo says Perkins began his career in the mid-1980s as chief designer for SOTA, the turntable maker whose Star Sapphire offered a vacuum hold-down, as Analog Planet has noted.

After about four and a half years there, the profile says, he set up Immedia, a distribution company selling phono cartridges made in Japan. Stereophile dated Immedia to 1990 in a 2010 interview, and the name, Perkins told the magazine, joins “media” and “immediate.” Soon afterwards he began making turntables under the RPM name. Writing in Tracking Angle in 2024, Michael Fremer said the RPM-2 turntable and RPM-2 tonearm, introduced around 1997, became classics whose industrial look “has been copied by many others.” Immedia later distributed Spiral Groove in the United States, alongside Canalis loudspeakers and Strange Attractors vibration-control accessories, according to a 2015 press release.

An SG1, a Japanese Grand Prix and a bayonet armboard.

The first Spiral Groove turntable, the SG1, appeared around 2007: What Hi-Fi? gives that year for the SG1, while WIRED attached it to the revised SG1.1. In 2007, the university profile says, a Spiral Groove turntable won the Grand Prix award of the Japanese magazine Stereo Sound — the publication Perkins had read in Japan — and Stereophile’s 2010 interview also described the SG1 as a winner of that award. By then the range comprised the SG1, the less costly SG2 and a newly launched tonearm, the Centroid.

The engineering was distinctive. The company called its method Balanced Force Design, which it described as achieving “the most elegant equilibrium of materials, performance, function, manufacturability and beauty.” According to its 2015 press release, the flagship’s body used two constrained-layer platforms separated by elastomers; the platter ran on an inverted sapphire-disc and hardened-steel bearing and was driven at the bearing’s fulcrum; a low-voltage AC synchronous motor was decoupled from the rest of the deck; and a magnetic platter-levitation system was fitted. The armboard came out on a stainless-steel bayonet at the push of a button, so that several arms could be kept set up and swapped. Perkins told Tone Audio in 2012 that the bayonet was inspired by his Leica cameras and made in-house.

Prices placed Spiral Groove among the most expensive American decks. Tone Audio listed the SG2 at $15,000 without an arm and the SG1 at $25,000 in 2012. The SG1.2, announced from Berkeley in September 2015, added a heavier platter, new feet based on the company’s Strange Attractor isolators and about 20 pounds of weight, at $30,000; SG1.1 owners could have their decks upgraded for $6,000. A second model, the Revolution, was announced in 2014, according to Mono & Stereo, and cost $18,000, with the Centroid arm at $6,000, when Dagogo reviewed it in 2018. Fremer wrote that the SG1.2 with Centroid arm sold for $36,000.

American analogue, documented.

The seven brands in this group are small. Each makes turntables, tonearms or both, and several are still closely tied to the engineer who designed the first product. Between them they work from seven countries: the United States, Britain, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Switzerland and New Zealand.

In Britain, AVID Hifi Ltd has its registered office on an industrial park in Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire, Companies House shows. In Denmark, Bergmann Audio, which makes air-bearing turntables and linear-tracking arms, gives its address as Hobro. J.Sikora lists a street address in Lublin, in eastern Poland.

Reed tonearms come from Tonearms.lt, a Lithuanian company whose address is a village in the Kaunas district. Thales is made by HiFiction AG, which the Swiss commercial register places in Turbenthal, in the canton of Zurich.

Two brands need more care. Spiral Groove’s 2015 press releases were datelined Berkeley, California, but its website returned an error when we checked in October 2026, and its present status is unclear. Well Tempered Lab sells the designs of William Firebaugh. Its website gives a New Zealand phone number and says Opera Audio of Beijing makes the products, and TNT-Audio reported in 2016 that the brand is owned by a New Zealand company.

Small makers often say more about themselves than outsiders can confirm, from founding dates to materials to claims of hand assembly at home. Company registers, dated reviews and press releases settle some of this. The rest is the company’s word.

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 designer who moved on to MoFi.

Spiral Groove’s founder has since moved on. Roughly ten years after founding the company, the university profile says, Perkins began consulting for MoFi Electronics, the Mobile Fidelity hardware brand, which it describes as a subsidiary of Music Direct. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2017, pt.AUDIO reported, a Spiral Groove Revolution played in Mobile Fidelity’s suite, and Perkins was “responsible for all the new Mobile Fidelity UltraDeck, and StudioDeck turntables.” Fremer’s 2024 review of the MoFi MasterDeck, a $5,995 turntable made in Ann Arbor, Michigan, calls it the “budget priced” Spiral Groove turntable Perkins never built for his own company, with an inverted bearing and a counterweight derived from the Centroid’s.

The same review says Perkins had “stopped producing his own turntables” a few years earlier. In June 2024 the university reported that he had left Berkeley, his home of 35 years, for Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and was still consulting for MoFi. We found no announcement that Spiral Groove has closed, and we did not check California’s business register. But its storefront at spiral-groove.com returned an error when we checked in October 2026, and the address without the hyphen, spiralgroove.com, is listed for sale by a domain reseller and has nothing to do with the turntables. On the evidence available, Spiral Groove is best described as a brand that appears to have stopped making turntables, not one known to have closed.

For a design guide, Spiral Groove shows how a one-designer workshop can build a reputation on engineering ideas — a bayonet armboard, an inverted bearing, a named design method — that outlast its own production. Compare VPI, another American turntable maker built around its founding designer, and Basis Audio. For this guide we use graphite, brushed aluminium and a sapphire blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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