The new Orbit custom turntable configurator allows you to build your own turntable, selecting from a variety of platters, plinths, speed controllers, preamps, cartridges, and more to create your own personalized record player.
Turntables have been seeing a huge surge in popularity in recent years, no one is exactly sure why, but the warmer tone of vinyl and the general public’s tiredness of music becoming a subscription rather than something you own, may both have had something to do with it.
This is the Orbit custom turntable configurator, it allows you to build your own turntable, selecting from a variety of platters, plinths, speed controllers, preamps, cartridges, and more to create your own personalized record player.
History Speedrun: U-Turn Audio
Three friends from the Lexington High School, class of 2007, started U-Turn Audio in 2012 with a $2,500 USD university grant and a wildly-successful Kickstarter campaign – by late 2022 the company had sold 125,000 of its Orbit turntables from a workshop in Woburn, Massachusetts. Company founders Bob Hertig, Ben Carter, and Peter Maltzan were all born in 1988, they came to love record players through Hertig, who had grown up playing his parents’ collection on a Fisher-Price phonograph and ran a used-record business in high school.
College split them up – Hertig studied mechanical engineering at Northeastern, Maltzan went to the Berklee College of Music, and Carter studied philosophy at Cornell. As fate would have it, by the fall of 2011 they were living within a block of each other in Boston. Hertig and Maltzan were listening to a lousy record player on their porch, and Hertig’s argument was that a turntable at the same price, stripped of extras and built around sound quality as its single defining feature, would be something they’s want – and other people might want it too.
They late said that the choice at the time was a $40 plastic player or a $300 turntable. Carter, unhappy in a health care consulting job, joined them, and U-Turn was incorporated in 2012.
Northeastern’s IDEA venture accelerator awarded them a $2,500 USD Prototype Fund grant, enough to build the first Orbit. The Kickstarter campaign ran from December of 2012 to January 2013 with a $60,000 USD goal. 1,133 backers pledged an astonishing total of $233,940 USD, and $150 bought a new U-Turn turntable. Shipments to customers began in September of 2013.
The Orbit turntable takes its name from its external belt drive system – the AC synchronous motor sits apart from the platter on a rubber suspension to keep motor vibration from reaching the stylus, and the platter runs on an inverted main bearing.
In 2016 the company estimated at least 80% of its parts were American-made, with the motors imported from China, and by 2019 the powder-coated MDF plinths were arriving from Minnesota and the machined metal parts from Connecticut. Every turntable was assembled in Woburn, took about an hour to build, and spent 90 minutes on a burn-in rack before final inspection.
Company founders Bob Hertig, Ben Carter, and Peter Maltzan all came to love record players through Hertig, who had grown up playing his parents’ collection on a Fisher-Price phonograph and ran a used-record business in high school.
The music-business analyst Bob Lefsetz said that year he suspected the vinyl revival was a fad and that U-Turn’s sales would decline in the long term. By late-2019 the company put its sales total at more than 70,000, most of it sold direct through its website. Three years later the figure was around 125,000, with 25 full-time employees.
The company moved upmarket in 2022 with the Orbit Theory, a $999 turntable with electronic speed control, an Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge, a solid rift-cut walnut or ebonized white oak plinth, and an OA3 Pro tonearm with a one-piece magnesium armtube.
In August 2023 that technology reached the rest of the range in what the company called its first refresh of the Orbit lineup. The OA3 tonearm, also with a one-piece magnesium armtube, became standard on the Basic, Plus, Special, and Custom, while the Theory kept the more adjustable OA3 Pro.
Electronic speed control was offered on the Special and Custom. The current lineup runs from the $249 Orbit Basic to the Theory, alongside the Pluto 2 phono preamp and Ethos powered speakers, all still assembled in Woburn. The company also now has a turntable configurator on its site, allowing customers to spec-out their own deck and have it hand-built for them.
The Orbit Custom By U-Turn Audio
The Orbit Custom is the build-to-order version of U-Turn Audio’s popular Orbit turntable series. The buyer configures it in seven steps – from finish, platter, speed control, cartridge, cue lever, preamp, and finally, feet. It starts at $249 USD, a price that matches the Orbit Basic, with a black plinth, rubber feet, manual speed change, an MDF platter, no cue lever, and an Audio-Technica AT91B cartridge. Like every Orbit, each one is assembled and tested in U-Turn’s workshop in Massachusetts.
Every Custom uses the OA3 tonearm, which has a tapered one-piece magnesium armtube molded in the United States and a gimbal bearing. Buyers can choose between a grooved MDF platter or a frosted acrylic platter (machined in Massachusetts).
The company notes that wow and flutter are below 0.175% for the MDF platter and below 0.125% for the acrylic. Changing between 33 and 45 rpm is either manual, by moving the belt between two pulley grooves, or electronic, by turning a knob.
The Orbit Custom is the build-to-order version of U-Turn Audio’s popular Orbit turntable series. The buyer configures it in seven steps – from finish, platter, speed control, cartridge, cue lever, preamp, and finally, feet.
The five cartridge options are all moving-magnet designs, they include the AT91B, the Ortofon OM5E, the Grado Green4, the Ortofon 2M Red, and the Ortofon 2M Blue. The other options are a silicone-damped cue lever, a built-in Pluto 2 phono preamp that lets the turntable connect straight to an amplifier or powered speakers, and height-adjustable aluminum Iso-Level feet with Sorbothane in place of the rubber ones.
If you’d like to to configure your own Orbit Custom you can visit the U-Turn configurator here, and every turntable comes with a dust cover, felt mat, and RCA cables, and carries a 3-year warranty.
Images courtesy of U-Turn Audio
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
