This wild turntable plays vinyl without a tonearm, automatically detects the RPM, and is a solid lump of aluminum

The Waiting For Ideas PP-1 is carved from a single aluminum block
Also available with 80W companion speakers
€5,800 (about $6,000 / £4,788 / AU$9,700)

It’s safe to say you won’t see the new PP-1 turntable in Best Buy or on Amazon: it’s as much an art statement as it is a turntable, and it has a price tag to match. But if you can spare around $6K you’ll have a turntable that you’ll spend as much time looking at as listening to.

The PP-1 comes from the design studio Waiting For Ideas, and it’s very different to anything in our list of the best turntables. There’s no tonearm for starters: instead, you place the record face down and the stylus emerges from inside to play it. And it’s made very differently from typical turntables too.

Waiting For Ideas PP-1: key features

As noted by our colleagues at Wallpaper.com , each made-to-order PP-1 is carved from a solid block of aluminum, and the design is extremely minimalist: there are just two controls on top, one for speed selection (including an auto-detect setting, and it will switch between 33rpm or 78rpm automatically) and one for controlling playback and volume.

There are matching speakers too, and they’ve been designed to have the same footprint as the record player – so you can stack them up in a column with the turntable on top, stereo separation be damned.

The goal, says studio boss Jean-Baptiste Anotin, is to capture the “ritual nature of record playing” – although the absence of a tonearm means that one of the most obvious parts of the ritual, putting the needle on the record, is done differently here.

The PP-1 is available now either on its own for €5,800 (about $6,000 / £4,788 / AU$9,700) or with a speaker pair for €9,000 (about $9,365 / £7,430 / AU$15,065). Each PP-1 is made to order and you can find out more from the Waiting For Ideas website.

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