With the resurgence of vinyl in recent years, we’ve seen more and more new turntable models released from different outfits, each one touting excellent vibration isolation, superb feedback resistance, consistent speeds, and minimal surface noise. You know… the kind of things you want in a good record player. Heck, we even see vinyl jukeboxes on occasion. The Audio Technica Hotaru should offer those things as well, but it’s’ the visual elements that really set it apart in the market.
Touted as a way to “explore new possibilities for experiencing analog music,” the device seeks to go beyond the auditory aspect of record players by putting as much effort into the accompanying aesthetics. The result is a turntable that’s a veritable visual treat, allowing you to enjoy the player itself as much as whatever music it’s playing.
The Audio Technica Hotaru has two notable elements that make it such a visual showcase compared to every other turntable in the market. First, the upper section of the record player levitates in a very slight but noticeable height above the lower section. It’s not just a visual trick, either, as it actually uses magnets on both upper and lower sections to have the two repel each other. The lower section houses the speaker components, which produce vibrations. Since there’s no physical contact between the two levels, the device is able to isolate the actual turntable from those vibrations, making the floating design an actual functional decision.
Hotaru, by the way, is Japanese for firefly, those glowing beetles that produce light using bioluminescence. The record player is so named because it has built-in lighting that glows as the vinyl spins on the platter, making it practically impossible to ignore. The colors and intensities of the light will be affected based the music playing, by the way, so this works much like a more sophisticated version of your favorite party speakers.
The Audio Technica Hotaru’s lighting system ccomes with a color palette of just 20 shades, by the way, so it’s not quite as wildly colorful as many LED systems out there. However, they offer three different lighting modes, namely Basic, Gradiation, and Link. In Basic, the color of the light stays the same through the duration of the listening session; in Gradiation, light smoothly transitions from one color to the next; in Link, the light changes in response to the character of the music playing, so it acts more like a matching visual accompaniment to your music.
The record player uses a concealed belt drive system that’s powered by an unspecified DC servo motor that can get it running at both 33 1/3 and 45 RPM speeds. Playback is facilitated by a specially-designed VM stereo cartridge that’s mounted on a statically-balanced carbon tonearm. As we said earlier, it has a speaker system installed at the lower section, which is made up of two 2.5-inch full-range speakers and two 0.75-inch tweeters. This setup delivers a frequency response of 60Hz to 20kHz, with a sensitivity of 82 dB. If you don’t want to use the onboard speakers, there’s also a line-out, a subwoofer output, and power connector for its 12V supply.
The Audio Technica Hotaru is available now, priced at $9,999.
