An engineer’s lineage, then a house brand.

TechDAS is a Tokyo turntable brand with a long back story. It is the house brand of Stella Inc., a Japanese importer and distributor of high-end audio based in Itabashi, Tokyo, and it was started in 2010 by Hideaki Nishikawa, according to both the company and Stereophile, whose analogue columnist Michael Fremer set out Nishikawa’s career in a 2021 review. The “DAS” in the name, the company says, stands for “Digital Analog Supremacy.”

Nishikawa trained as a mechanical engineer, graduating in 1963, and joined Stax, the Japanese maker of electrostatic headphones, in 1964. From there the two accounts differ. TechDAS’s own timeline says he left Stax in 1973 to set up an OEM business with former colleagues, designing products sold under other names — among them electrostatic headphones for Micro Seiki and the Black Widow for Infinity; Fremer wrote that he left Stax in 1980. Both agree that in 1980 he joined Micro Seiki, the Japanese record-player maker, where he managed the technical department and, the company says, later became Sound Business Director.

At Micro Seiki his statement product was the SX-8000, a system turntable made from 1981 to 1990 with a heavy metal platter driven by an outboard motor. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Stereo Sound, says Micro Seiki’s top players floated the platter on air and sucked the record down onto it; the company, founded in 1961, no longer exists. In 1989 Nishikawa co-founded Stellavox Japan with Yasuo Nakanishi as an importer of high-end equipment. He became its chief executive in 1994, and the firm was renamed Stella Inc. in June 2012, both TechDAS and Stella’s own site say.

Air bearings and vacuum hold-down.

The first TechDAS turntable was the Air Force One. Fremer met Nishikawa at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show and reported in Stereophile that April that it was based on the SX-8000, sharing its considerable mass and its double-lipped vacuum hold-down. It cost $97,000, or $103,000 with a Graham Elite tonearm. Its chassis was layered from two aluminium alloys and weighed 94lb, and its forged stainless-steel platter floated on a cushion of air. Graham Engineering, of Massachusetts, was then its American distributor.

Two ideas run through every model, the company says: an air bearing that floats the platter and a vacuum hold-down that clamps the record to it, borrowed from the lathes that cut lacquer masters. The range then grew in both directions. The Air Force Three appeared at the AXPONA show in 2016 at $27,000, AnalogPlanet reported, and the Air Force V, at $19,500, was reviewed by Stereophile in August 2019. At the top, the Air Force Zero was first shown as a prototype at The Audio Salon in Santa Monica in April 2019. Reviewing it in 2021, Fremer gave its base price as $450,000 and wrote that it took three years to develop. Its stack of five platters floats on a 10-micrometre layer of air, and its run is limited — to about 40 units, he was told — because it uses new-old-stock Papst motors originally made for Revox tape recorders.

In 2019 Fremer noted, half in jest, that there was no Air Force IV because four is considered unlucky in East Asia. The TechDAS site now lists a new Air Force IV alongside the Zero, the One Premium, the III Premium and the V Premium, as well as the Air Force 10 tonearm, TDC01 cartridges and a mounting rack.

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 Japan, by its own account.

Where are TechDAS turntables made? The company says “All products are made in Japan” and that Stella designs and develops them; we found no independent account naming a factory or contractors, so that rests on its word. Stella’s Japanese site says the firm now develops and manufactures its own products alongside its import business. That site names a different representative director as chief executive today; Stereophile described Nishikawa as Stella’s CEO in 2013, and we did not find when that changed. We found no record of a sale of Stella or of TechDAS.

There are two name traps. The similar address stella-inc.co.jp belongs to an unrelated Japanese company that makes fortune-telling apps; TechDAS’s parent uses stella-inc.com. And, as Fremer pointed out in 2013, the TechDAS Air Force One should not be confused with the Forsell Air Force One turntable of the 1990s. TechDAS publishes no brand colours or typeface. Its look is the hardware itself — machined, anodised aluminium, large round platters and outboard motors — which Fremer called “a visually stunning technological tour de force,” while allowing that some might find it “too busy.”

For a design guide, TechDAS shows how a brand can be carried by an engineer’s lineage — from Stax to Micro Seiki to a name of its own — as much as by a logo. Compare Koetsu, another Japanese analogue name built around a single designer, and Dynavector, another Japanese analogue specialist. For this guide we use an anodised silver, a graphite and a steel blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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