A summary of our Facebook-posts:
- The success of the Kickstarter campaign drew a lot of attention. Designer Peter Kolkman was invited by several talkshows on Dutch television. Websites, blogs, newspapers and magazines wrote about Wheel. Yes, even the Dutch Playboy did a fotoshoot.
- The team visited the Record Industry, one of the largest and best vinyl pressing plants in the world. It’s owner, Ton Vermeulen, gave us some good advise. On Facebook we posted a short video impression of the visit.
- In another post we explained we can’t use parts of tone-arms of other hifi-specialists. Every small part is more or less ‘invented’ by the Miniot team. That’s because the built-in linear tone-arm has to be extremely small.
- After the Kickstarter ended most of our backers still had to choose their favorite wood. We can say now mahogany is favorite, walnut comes in second and the also beautiful cherry third. Some backers switched to the more expensive piano black/warm silver limited edition.
- We wrote why even the aluminum platter stands out from the rest of the pack. The platter has to be hollow, to create the space needed for all the well protected turntable parts. The risk of a hollow platter is it’ll work as a resonance chamber, ours will be ‘acoustically dead’.
- The image which showed Wheel flanked by similar looking speakers is very popular. Backers and interviewers asked if these speakers could be ordered too. No, they don’t exist.., yet. But who knows what next year will bring. Miniot has been experimenting with speakers already.
- Wheel has two amplifiers. One serves the headphone output, the other is a line-out pre-amp that provides wired signal to a power amp, active speakers or a wireless streaming device. Backed by the Kickstarter-success we can work with even better high-end components than those used in the prototypes.