John Nilsen

John is our very own in-house turntable expert and acclaimed LP 12 engineer. Johnie has worked on and off in the hi-fi industry for 30 years – his other project Audio Origami, manufacturers a range of turntable tonearms including the excellent PU7 tonearm. John has a lifetime of turntable set up experience and offers a range of specialist services including tonearm rewires and bearing replacement.

John’s One LP is: Portishead – Roseland NYC Live

“This is Portishead, it’s a live album from New York – round about 1999. Round about the year 2000 I was looking for a test album that I could use to develop my own tonearms and this kind of ticks a lot of boxes for me because the recording’s so dynamic and repeatable.

It’s such an easy album to listen to I could easily find myself spending half an hour on a test I thought would take five minutes so really there’s very few albums I regard as much as a test album as this, and as I said helped develop the tonearm in the early days.
And it’s thanks to the staff at Loud & Clear that I’ve been so successful.”

William Ellis – What are the requirements for you John when choosing a test record?

“Something that’s got a bit of everything, a bit of bass, bit of treble – maybe some female voices, especially anything orchestral and this particular album’s got virtually a whole orchestra in the background so each one of them has a certain little part to play. When you’re actually listening to it on a high definition system you can hear just about everybody in their correct place – it really is a a 3D experience, it’s as if you’re waking through a lot of the passages because of the way they’ve mixed it – sucked in the sound and pushed it out, it’s really very enjoyable and as I say when using it for testing purposes it gave me a basis where I could use it time time again on the same track to see exactly what the changes I’ve made to the particular resonances or the presentation that the tone arm delivers.”