Waiting for Ideas have recast the turntable as a minimal aluminium altar for vinyl worship

Aluminium continues its current run as favoured material for high-quality and mindful audiophile action. This is the PP-1 turntable, designed by the Paris-based studio Waiting for Ideas. Set up by Jean-Baptiste Anotin in 2021, the creative studio has worked across a variety of disciplines, including retail space projects for the likes of Lacoste, Reebok and Shinzo, and artist collaborations with Iris Marchand, Mathilde Hiley and Pierre Vaillant. Anotin’s brief for every new project is to ‘craft a new story.’

The PP-1 turntable is carved from a solid square of aluminium, a monolithic chunk of metal into which the platter is countersunk. As a result, any disc you spin on the PP-1 appears flush with the surface. Waiting for Ideas has emphasised this sense of a solid, structural lump by designing a pair of accompanying speakers.

The speakers have an identical footprint to the record player, allowing them to be stacked like a totem pole with the disc on top, or separated for more conventional stereo sound. Fully wrapped in black fabric, they offer a dark counterpoint to the raw aluminium of the turntable.

The PP-1 is a symphony of precise alignments, with controls and outputs pared back to the bare minimum. For Anotin, the idea was to emphasise the ritual nature of record playing, removing the disc from its sleeve, carefully placing it atop the player and switching it on.

The eagle eyed will have noticed that the PP-1 lacks a conventional tone arm. Instead, the needle is set below the platter, protected by a cover that opens when a record is placed on the platter. This means you need to place the disc down face up, i.e. the side you don’t want to play.

By taking away the small act of putting the needle on the record, the PP-1 takes vinyl back to its raw essence, described by the studio as ‘an object for those who don’t just want to listen—but to feel the music.’ This concealed mechanism is also capable of detecting whether it’s a 33 or 45 (although whether it does this by the size of the vinyl or the actual grooves is unclear).

All in all, Waiting for Ideas has managed to take the most minimal form of analogue music and distil it even further, reducing vinyl to its essential essence as a physical object that’s placed on a pedestal to worship.

More information on the PP-1 can be found at waiting-for-ideas.com, @waiting.for.ideas