Translations:

‘Only the simplest can accommodate the most complex’!

This is the motto of talented japanese designer Junji Kimura, Having designed many key components for Pioneer, Kenwood (known as Trio at the time), Luxman and Kyocera, from the early 1960′s through to the beginning of the 90′s, in 1992 he decided to free himself from corporate constraints and found his own company, 47 Laboratory.

Junji’s approach is concerned with the sheer pleasure and emotion that listening to music can convey.

This fit’s in perfectly with our approach at Sound Galleries. At the same time Junji’s singular approach has lead to products which are completely unique. The Shigaraki components are so small and unobtrusive they can be accommodated easily within any domestic environment.

They take their name from a type of Japanese ceramic used to make daily home utensils. These exquisitely designed petite components can work well on quality home furniture and may not require dedicated audio stands to sound their best. They are domestically acceptable and musically satisfying to a very high degree.

The first product Junji designed for 47 Labs was his legendary Pi-Tracer CD transport.

The Pi-Tracer is the only CD transport which is able to maintain a strict 90 degree laser to CD reading angle. It also automatically corrects for the manufacturing fault of CDs whose spindle holes are punched off-center. All this adds up to a transport which can extract the maximum musical information from the Compact Disc.

The Pi-Tracer stands as an ultimate statement of what can be achieved in CD playback and understandably a precision instrument such as this is expensive. Nevertheless I was pleasantly surprised when I encountered it at the Top Audio Show in Milan to discover it is also relatively small and neat looking.

While designing the Pi-Tracer Junji needed a simple amplifier with a completely predictable sound that he could use as a reference. Having nothing suitable to hand, like a master chef who can whip up a tasty meal in minutes, he pieced an amplifier together from a few simple parts. Surprised himself at how good the result was, he tweaked it to perfection. The result is the equally legendary Gaincard amplifier.

Holding a record for the smallest number of parts and shortest signal paths, it has had a major influence on other designers and resulted in a number of clones.

With two separate ‘Power Dumpty’ power supplies it becomes a true ‘Dual Mono’ design.

Returning to the subject of CD payback, for those who find the Pi-Tracer too expensive, 47 Labs offer the also highly innovative ‘Flatfish’ CD transport and the still more affordable Shigaraki transport. Whilst neither can quite scale to the heights of performance offered by the Pi-Tracer, they produce highly musically satisfying results, coupled with the ‘Progression’ DAC or ‘Shigaraki’ DAC respectively.

For Vinyl enthusiasts there is now a 47Labs Turntable. One of my favorite toys as a child was a Gyroscope. I was fascinated by its ability to stay spinning absolutely upright on the end of my finger for an amazingly long time, considering it only needed my initial energy in pulling the string to start it in motion. The 47Labs Turntable is the first to use a Gyroscopic principle to cancel the tendency for the turntable platter to by pulled in one direction by the drive belt.

Other designers have employed different approaches such as additional motors around the platter in an attempt to cancel this tendency which is detrimental to the ability of the stylus to perfectly trace a record groove; but additional motors can introduce problems of their own in the form of unwanted vibration and noise.

Instead Junji makes use of a second platter which rotates in the opposite counter clockwise direction underneath the main platter. As with the Gyroscope, this keeps the platters absolutely stable, maintaining the same relationship with the turntable spindle at all times.

It is typical of the ‘out of the box’ Japanese zen approach to design applied to all 47Labs products.

I was reminded of my childhood years as I watched with fascination the one platter turning contra clockwise direction to the other via their Red drive belts and wish I’d have taken a video camera to the show. More importantly, the sound from records was sublime.

The tonearm is equally innovative in its ability to cancel noise from less than perfectly flat records.

A complete 47Labs vinyl playback system would include a 47Labs Phono-Stage and either the high value for money McBee cartridge or one of the top of the line Miyabi cartridges.

Whether you choose a CD or Vinyl system (or both) from 47Labs, you can complete the system with the neat little, beautiful sounding stand mounted ‘Lens’ or ‘AMM’ speakers designed by Takanori Ohmura or go all the way up to Junji’s personal reference Essence Speaker, designed by 47Labs head of European operations Sead Lejlic.

47Labs certainly take novel and unique approaches to design, though all for sound reasons.

If your are a music lover and you want your system to blend in with your living environment, we recommend you take a trip to Sound Galleries and audition 47Labs. Visit 47 Labs.