Dear Santa: Please May I Have a Wilson Benesch this Year..?
With vinyl sales at a record high this year - their highest since 1996 - our Riddle writer puts the Wilson Benesch Circle 25 at the top of his Christmas wish list
Article by Sam Clark
In November, the European Space Agency landed a fridge-sized space ship on a mountain-sized mass of an unknown consistency over 6bn kilometres away, traveling at 18km per second (40,000mph). If you’re really lucky, this December Wilson Benesch will land a needle in a 40 micrometres-deep groove, 80 micrometres wide, on a disc of vinyl traveling at 33⅓ rpm using space ship materials and pinpoint accuracy, all in the comfort of your living room.
Wilson Benesch, British manufacturers of ultra high-end audio equipment, launched the Circle 25 earlier this year to celebrate their 25th Anniversary. It’s essentially a complete redesign of the classic Circle turntable which was already an award-winning record player of exceptional quality. To accomplish the unlikely feat of improving on the original, the acoustic boffins at Wilson Benesch have blended turned aluminium, steel, high-grade engineering polymer and aerospace carbon into a platform that NASA would be proud of.
The all-important bearings are constructed with materials so meticulously selected, they have identical expansion coefficients, so you’ll get optimum performance no matter how close, or far, your living room should be from the sun. The landing gear, the A.C.T. 25 Tonearm, is moulded carbon fibre, five times stronger than steel. This is one of the stiffest, lightest and most highly optimised tonearms in the world, with the exception of Wilson Benesch’s own stellar Nanotube One. You’re not going to need to balance 5p pieces with blue tack on the end of this to stop it jumping across your aged copy of Dark Side of the Moon…
Of course, you’ll need some speakers to actually hear just how good the Circle 25 is, and with that in mind Riddle will be taking a trip to Yorkshire in the new year to visit Wilson Benesch mission control, in the hope of getting to turn the world’s first curved carbon fibre loudspeaker up to 12. 
Enquiries: wilson-benesch.com