Kenwood KP-1100

Absolutely deceptive looking turntable hiding everything under near-blank looks.

What's to be hidden is the big diecast frame you can see here which was meant to be the center of a sort of "mechanical closed-loop". As in all of Kenwood's production since 1978 (LS-1900, L-07D, LS-1000 etc), rigidity was the engineering goal but at less than 100k¥ it was difficult to re-do the L-07D...

So in came the "Closed Loop Frame Structure" which took everything into account : motor+arm (like Micro), enclosure (rendered thus almost "external"), bottom plate and dustcover.

The DC DL motor (Dynamic center Lock), developed earlier, has paterned slits cut on the shafts' surface and a thin film of special oil which allow very low friction but high-rigidity and durability ; speed tracking rely on a twin-circuit servo linked to a Hall element, with care taken on temperature variations.

The DS tonearm (Dynamic Stability), developed earlier as well, is of the knife-edge type and although it looks like "electronica", it isn't.

The KP-1100 sold very well, got a few magazine covers and was replaced by the exactly identical KP-9010 in 1988 which sold just as well (in Japan) ; both were T-tagged by either OKN, CDK and, mostly, Seiko Ind..