Vacuum-Argon Reference Turntable V1 (Legend)

The original. The one that started it all.

When we introduced the Vacuum-Argon Reference Turntable in 2020, we chose a hand-blown borosilicate glass bell jar as the argon containment vessel. It was beautiful — a cathedral of gas surrounding the platter, the record visible through curved glass like a specimen in a museum, the argon faintly shimmering under certain lighting conditions. Every bell jar was unique, hand-blown by a single glassblower in Quito using sand sourced from the banks of the Guayllabamba River at 0.0018° south latitude.

It was also impractical. The bell jar required manual lifting (4.8 kg of glass), careful alignment on the base gasket, and a 90-second argon purge cycle every time the lid was removed. Customers with back problems could not operate it. Customers with cats learned quickly. The curved glass created internal reflections that, under specific lighting conditions, generated measurable optical standing waves inside the chamber — beautiful to look at, irrelevant to audio performance, but impossible to explain to customers who noticed them and assumed they were a defect.

In 2025, we replaced the bell jar with the V2’s motorized rectangular sealed chamber — a flat-topped, straight-sided acrylic box that seals to the plinth with a gasket and opens via a servo-driven hinge. It is more practical, more reliable, and arguably better in every measurable way.

It is not more beautiful. We acknowledge this.

The V1 was manufactured in a run of 847 units between 2020 and 2025. All are accounted for. We do not plan to manufacture more. The sand deposit has been exhausted. The glassblower has retired to a cooperative in Otavalo. The mold was destroyed on the last day of production in a ceremony attended by the entire Quito facility staff.

If you own a V1, you own a piece of Equatorial Audio history. Argon refill service will continue through 2035. After that, we recommend switching to the V2 or displaying the V1 as the conversation piece it has become.

If you do not own a V1, the secondary market has been active. We take no position on secondary market pricing, but we note that the last recorded sale was 40% above the original retail price. The bell jar, it turns out, was worth more than we charged for it.