An Awesome Wave
How U-Turn Audio surfed the peak of vinyl’s comeback
By David Grabowski
Hipster Nation
The term “hipster” re-entered the American lexicon in 2006, describing a subculture of millennials living in Brooklyn warehouses, wearing skinny jeans, and riding fixed-gear bicycles. They were also spinning vinyl records, presumably because it was so alternative to do so. Besides wax junkies and snooty audiophiles, no one cared about vinyl at the time.
CDs had swept vinyl under the rug in 1988, and digital music began its reign soon after. Spotify would arrive in 2008.
A year later, Ben Carter, Bob Hertig, and Peter Maltzan — the co-founders of what would become U-Turn Audio — were in college. They had inherited turntables and records from their parents, listening together since high school.
“I don’t think at the time I really thought too much about the vinyl market as an abstract thing,” says Carter. “I just knew that the cool people around me were listening to turntables at the time. It seemed like everyone who was ahead of trends was into vinyl.”
Something else happened in 2007: vinyl sales upticked. This was odd, because vinyl manufacturing had almost bottomed out in 2006. No one thought much of this; they blamed the hipsters.
But vinyl’s upswing was due to more than a subculture jonesing for nostalgia. That year saw the first gasps of a resurgence, marking a shift in consumer thinking around the experience of listening to music. For Ben Carter and his friends, 2007 was the year vinyl began to rise from a tiny burble in the marketplace.
They would come to see that swell reach tidal proportions.
Perseverance, Inc.
In 2011, Bob Hertig was looking for a new turntable; his options were compacted. He didn’t want a vintage table, which can be a fickle investment. He also didn’t want an all-in-one setup — the kind shaped like suitcases, sold in Urban Outfitters for under $100, and guaranteed to ruin records with their cheap needles. One step up would run him $400 or more for a turntable alone.
Bob’s fruitless quest uncovered a gaping hole in the new turntable marketplace; U-Turn Audio was born into the void.
The trio was soon building prototypes thanks to a grant from Northeastern University. Friends and family were dubious. Vinyl seemed a dated format, a collectible item at best. Ben & Co. had entered pitch contests and other events, but failed to place. “We always felt snubbed because we had this real product, we had a real position in the market identified, we had a real plan,” says Carter. “But it wasn’t sexy because it wasn’t an app, or it wasn’t digital. I don’t think people took us as seriously as we took ourselves.”
Hardcore vinylphiles had objections to pretty much every aspect of the design. Naysayers doubted that a respectable turntable was sustainable at a $150 price point. (In the end, U-Turn raised the price of their starter turntable, the Orbit, to $179.) But U-Turn’s main crutch was sizable: naiveté. The challenge was daunting: Creating a new music player for a format that had disappeared the year Ben and his friends were born. It would have been tempting to give up, but they sensed the swell on the horizon. Their passion for vinyl compelled them to keep going.
Bob’s fruitless quest uncovered a gaping hole in the new turntable marketplace; U-Turn Audio was born into the void.
U-Turn had three elements spinning in its favor: perseverance, willpower, and the internet. The internet has the unique ability to globally connect people with niched interests. The early rumblings of the vinyl revival had been online, on message boards and social sites. When U-Turn announced its Kickstarter campaign, it essentially walked into a stadium full of vinyl enthusiasts and projected its product on the Jumbotron.
The project goal was $60,000, but the campaign soared to a whopping $233,940, becoming one of the top-funded products on the platform. “The luck for us was largely our timing,” says Ben. “We all had a sense that vinyl was growing, and that this is something that would pay off, but I don’t think we knew how good the timing was.”
The Kickstarter run didn’t signal wedding bells — it was the bell that accompanies a fighter into the ring. “If we had done $60K, we would have fallen flat on our faces,” Carter quips. “There would be no way to do that.” Even with a final haul almost four times the initial goal, the campaign didn’t come close to covering the production run. “It certainly gave us the momentum we needed to get the rest of it done,” says Carter. “We had a very clear sense of our mission, which was ‘build a thousand turntables.’”
What followed were sleepless nights, long hours in clammy warehouses, and a production chain of two people (Bob and Pete). Suppliers stiffed the team for as much as $10,000 and withheld components because of competitors. But the trio pulled more funding from Northwestern, filling in gaps through family and friends. “Then we started doing pre-orders,” says Ben, “so we were using future product revenue to cash-flow the present, which is not something I recommend doing. It makes you nervous.”
Ben views that period of the company’s history as a phase. But U-Turn’s skin-of-the-teeth approach would soon solidify its identity. The reward for perseverance was huge.
The Wave Breaks
Between 2013 and 2014, US album sales dropped 11.2 percent, CDs fell by 15 percent, and digital sank 9.4 percent.
Vinyl sales, meanwhile, rose by over 50 percent.
U-Turn was in business at the moment vinyl sales exploded. Sales have pointed upward since, surged on by connoisseurs and newcomers alike. Record stores are buzzing. Subscription services like Vinyl Me, Please (which features U-Turn tables in its content) have emerged, offering colored pressings, like Miles Davis’ Sorcerer in hot pink. The vinyl industry posted double-digit growth for the seventh year in a row in 2017. This year, Sony will begin pressing vinyl again for the first time since 1989.
U-Turn is riding the crest of vinyl’s surge. They’ve produced over 45,000 turntables, operating out of an industrial complex in Boston, MA. They’re now a team of twenty, their growth has been strong, and their average order has gone way up. Every hardship U-Turn has endured has become ingrained in its identity.
The minimal aesthetic that defines U-Turn visually is due to the team’s shoestring budget. “The function really informs the form,” says Carter. It’s the reason U-turn uses a belt drive system, in which the motor is separate from the platter; a direct-drive system costs much more to produce. “Especially because the motor is so far away from the platter, it really looks different than a lot of other turntables,” says Carter. “But the motor’s far away from the platter to prevent vibrations from hitting it. It just so happens that it lent a distinctive look.”
The fact that U-Turn turntables are US-made has been integral to its branding. But this wasn’t a conscious marketing choice at first. In the early days, U-Turn couldn’t afford to export their manufacturing. But now, Carter says “. . . the customization we do would be basically impossible, doing it any other way.” (Each turntable is built to order.) “Made in Mass, not mass produced,” has become a definitive tagline.
The final straw in U-Turn’s hat is transparency. Carter puts it bluntly: “We try to be very no bullshit about things, because the audiophile world is full of bullshit . . . you’ll see all of these products that are pure snake oil . . . We still think of ourselves as consumers, I think, more than the average audio company does.” This transparency also translates to U-Turn’s customer service, which Ben heads. User queries get resolved within a day — a rare quality for an electronics brand.
U-Turn doesn’t make claims to the throne, either. “I wouldn’t discourage someone from buying another brand of turntable,” says Carter. “But I would just say, you could get a $350, built-out Orbit turntable, or something else for $700, and you’ll maybe get a 1 percent improvement in sound quality spending double the money . . . we’re trying to get you 99 percent of the way there for half the price.”
Future Rotations
The main question for U-Turn’s future is a palpable one: How far will vinyl go before it plateaus? Is vinyl, pardon the pun, on rotation? Will it fizzle, only to rear up in twenty-eight years when it’s fresh and hip again?
The dubious ask, “Why?” Streaming subscriptions are available at reasonable prices. Tidal’s high-fidelity tier can satiate the audiophile. (Spotify is rumored to be creating a hi-fi option as well.) Why would someone want the clutter of vinyl, not to mention the crackle of a bad pressing or dirty record?
It might be tempting to throw vinyl in a bin with Beanie Babies and Pokémon. But Carter says vinyl listeners are investing more in their equipment, which he sees as a “really positive sign.” Most of U-Turn’s revenue comes from the Orbit Custom, which can be customized a couple hundred ways. “The turntable is definitely, as far as consumer electronics go, a very personal one,” says Carter. “Generally you don’t even interact with your TV, right? You barely touch it. You use a remote.” Vinyl’s comeback is not only about collectorship, but the active listening experience it offers. And consumers are willing to invest in that.
It seems that concerns for vinyl’s sustainability often stem from comparison — “dangerous territory” according to Carter. “When we did the Kickstarter campaign, I originally had written the first section as a big exposé as to why vinyl was better than digital. And within two hours I had taken that down, because we’d gotten so much blowback.”
“They know what we’re doing, and they love the equipment, so those relationships that we’ve developed will help us survive no matter how the vinyl market as a whole does.”
Doubters ask if vinyl can replace digital, pitting the formats against each other. But vinyl’s general popularity might not be due to audio quality at all, but a conscious decision to enjoy its merits on a nonexclusive basis. Why not have both?
“It’s a very active listening experience,” says Carter. “And I listen to Spotify all the time, in my car and when I’m on the go, but music feels so different when you’re listening to albums instead of individual songs, when you’re flipping the album every 15 minutes, when you’re choosing a new one. Just the way you’re perceiving it is materially different . . . It’s a great way to share the music experience [in a] way that you can never do with digital . . . There’s something about that group listening experience that is pretty powerful.”
Despite the upward trend, Carter says there are concerns. “I think we’ve already seen a significant slowing of growth, in at least the US new vinyl market. But I think that vinyl does such a good job retaining people that it’s going to remain a healthy niche for decades.”
For U-Turn, the next stage is innovation. “How do we create a new feature or a new product that really speaks to someone, and gets them to ditch their vintage table, or their Crosley, or their U-Turn from five years ago?” asks Ben. The company’s name is U-Turn Audio, not “U-Turn Turntables,” and Carter says he’d like to have another significant product on the marketplace in three years. (What that is exactly he won’t hint at.)
U-Turn’s priority is still their current offering, and getting it into as many hands as possible. “We have a lot of one-time customers,” Ben says, “but we want those folks to come back and be involved in the next thing U-Turn does . . . that’s our biggest asset going into the future. Because they are U-Turners. They know what we’re doing, and they love the equipment, so those relationships that we’ve developed will help us survive no matter how the vinyl market as a whole does.”
The story of U-Turn is a classic tale of perseverance in the face of adversity — perseverance that has paid off in droves. Critics might call it luck, but that would sell the story short. Yes, there was a wave, but Ben and his friends had to swim after it.
They’re still swimming.
As American politician Frank A. Clark said, “It’s hard to detect good luck — it looks so much like something you’ve earned.”
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