You know it when you see it. A component so outlandish, so obviously engineered outside of the norms of this industry, so completely untethered from convention.
Back in 2003, I reviewed a pair of Wilson Benesch Discovery loudspeakers and absolutely loved them. They sounded great, and the pair looked like they were drop-shipped straight out of a science-fiction movie. So whenever I cruise through an audio show, I always make a point to see what this British company, which pioneered the use of carbon fiber in audio, is up to.
Imagine my surprise when I walked in the door of their room in the ACV and first laid eyes on a pair of Endeavour 3Zero speakers, which are a direct descendant of the Discovery speakers I reviewed so long ago. Then I looked over and was absolutely gobsmacked by a turntable that quite literally looked like nothing else I’ve ever seen. This was the Wilson Benesch Greenwich turntable, part of their GMT collection. Before I get into the details of how this thing works, I think I need to describe how this company designs products like this space-and-time-distorting turntable.
Wilson Benesch takes advantage of UK government grants that encourage collaboration across industries and institutions, with the goal of developing products that would be better and more innovative than what would be possible without that cooperation. The goal is to produce something genuinely new and innovative. It’s a very competitive process. And so, it took 12 years from concept to design and build the Greenwich, which was being shown for the first time in Europe here at High End 2026.
While there are a ton of unique features encapsulated within the Greenwich, the most obvious one is its direct-drive motor, which is placed along the perimeter of the platter rather than at the spindle. The drive is a large air-gap, 15″ direct-drive, low-torque motor with a 2cm gap between magnet and coil, so there’s absolutely zero cogging. There are three different phases on the motor, each phase controlling seven coils, for a total of 21 coils. The controller uses all three phases at startup, then reduces power to coast at the correct speed.
The platter is magnetically levitated, not all the way, just enough to take some of the weight off the bearing. Embedded in the acrylic platter are austenitic stainless-steel weights to add mass.
I spent some time with Luke Milnes, Wilson Benesch’s marketing and international sales director, and as clear and articulate as he was, he left my head spinning. That crazy-looking arm is called the Graviton T1, which is also part of the GMT collection. It’s a unipivot, but there’s so much stuff going on within it that just calling it a unipivot doesn’t seem fair. But I’ll leave it there for now, as I was really spun around by Milnes’s explanations of the incredible clever-think that went into this design. Hand-laid carbon fiber that’s tapered on a curve. Sintered titanium. Mass optimization. That sort of thing.
I asked the price of this turntable, and it seems that the one on display is the entry model in the GMT collection; it retails for €98,000. The Graviton T1 ’arm adds another €32,000, and since we’re building a system, you’ll want their Tessellate TI‑D cartridge for another €14,290. Oh, and there’s a horny-looking stand in the GMT collection that you can include since we’re in this deep.
Jason Thorpe
Senior Editor, SoundStage!
