Citronic PD-45 ULTIMA demonstration, review

0:00 In this video I'm doing a product demonstration for a company called C

Alright guys, in this video I'm doing a product demonstration for a company called Citronic. It's on this guy here. It's a vinyl turntable. Now first of all, with the demise of the Technics SL1200, people are running around panicking, thinking what's next? What's going to happen? If you're not familiar, first of all... With the SL1200 it was undisputedly the best turntable around. Sadly they do not make it anymore. Bearing in mind this video was made in May 2011. So, are there any other alternatives? Well I want to show you this guy here from Citronic. Right, what are we dealing with? We are dealing with the PD45 Ultima. First and foremost, original sort of turntables used in nightclubs.

5:04 I'll just lock that back down

Pitch control, plus and minus 8, that was about it. Direct drive, good amount of torque, but as time moved on people decided they want to maybe make things a little bit better. Now without going into great detail, for quite a while, Technics... the crossfader and subwoofers. And that's it. Now that there is known, this is a direct drive motor. So if I put that on there, I'll put the slip map back on and away we go. I'll turn it on and press play. Now normal turntables, again I've got the wide angle lens so I will talk you through what's going on. 33 and 45. This one's slightly different. We've got 78 as well, so press the 33. The top here will move at 33 and a third RPM.

In other words, 33.3 revolutions per minute. If we hit 45, it will do 45 revolutions per minute based on, very important, To full speed is a fraction of a second. Here we go. There you go. Put it back on 33. As I move this guy clockwise, what will happen? Have a look. There you go. It will start to almost slowly pick up speed. And the break, if I move that now to 3 o'clock, watch if I press play pause, it will just start to slow down. So what we can do there, we can either make it start instantaneously. Slow down instantaneously or start slowly and stop straight away. So you've got a choice there. So in other words, you're playing away and all of a sudden you just want it to go...

7:45 This and maybe take a few

You can do that. Right, pitch control. Now again, when turntables started coming out, the club series of turntables, you had plus and minus 8. With this guy here, you've got plus and minus 10, 20, hitting both together, you've got 50 as well. So if I press play, if I just move the start...

I'll just lock that back down. And 20% means now I've got plus and minus 20 on the pitch. If I hit them both together, I've got plus and minus 50%. Now bearing in mind as well, a lot of people do think that vinyl is dead. Well it's not because out there people will still use the likes of virtual vinyl, the likes of Serato, Traktor etc. Right, I'm going to press... Play, pause on that as well. Right, another feature I want to show you, I'm going to turn it off, I'm going to now unplug it from the back of the mains and I'm going to turn this guy around like so. I've got a TV screen there as well so I can see what I'm doing. Now underneath there we have phono out. Now that will go to the phono input of your mixer and hopefully you can see there as well, phono and line.

All you need to do is switch that over and you can go then line in. But it's vitally important you make sure if it's online, you go into line and not phono and vice versa. That's your AC in. And one other feature we've got on this guy as well, we have play pause and play pause. So for example, if you want this guy in battle mode, Like so. You've got play, pause, two of them directly there. Okay, so there you go. Also one feature on this guy is this one here. This is the LED. Now a lot of people wonder what this is for. Well, it's very simple. When you put the needle on the record, like so, Adjust this at an angle so you can see where you're putting the needle on the record. Now that may sound a little bit like, well what's the point? Well if you look at a piece of vinyl you will see shiny bits and dark bits. The shiny bits quite often are where you haven't got much going on. It could be for the likes of an instrumental break, if you're using an LP it could be the quiet period before the next track. And the darker bits is where you've got a load of volume or a lot of sound coming through.

Now this guy here has got a... I'm going to take the wide-angle lens off for a second, it may go a bit blurry. Right, you've got that 2G small little thing on there. That is a two gram weight. You can take that off if you want to. Right, if we just move this over now to the back of the unit. Now again, please look at this and maybe take a few points as well. Now I have noticed there was a couple of videos, one especially with a guy who had his turntable And wondered why the needle wasn't going on the record and what this particular person had done, they got the weight all the way back. So of course they were just doing this and they couldn't work out why the cartridge styli wasn't sitting on the record correctly. Well that's of course because the counterweight at the back was set all the way back and not forward like so. Now again...

Anti-skating. What's that for? Well, if you've got this particular turntable set up correctly, what you can do is you can have this set up like so, balanced. What I used to do... Do this if you want to, but this is a tip I used to do. If I had a particular vinyl record that was one-sided, in other words, the other side was perfectly flat, I used to put the needle on that record, start it, and then what would happen... The needle would move from one side to the other. Now, I don't advise you to do this because you could ruin your style. I'm just explaining what I used to do. And then I used to set the anti-skating and you'd see the needle move across back and forwards as you were moving this guy. And what you need is you need it so it doesn't move at all. But if you're going to do that, please be very wary. All I can say is that I do it. Just be very, very careful.

Alright, another feature we've got on this as well, we've got a small locking mechanism at the back, at the main housing of the armrest. Now set like that, that locks the whole unit in place, move it across and what we can do now, we can increase the height of the whole housing of the tonearm. So now the entire arm, all of this will move up or down, like so. Alright, quick video on this guy from Citronic.com. It's known as the PD45 Ultima. The vinyl turntable, believe me, is not dead. Practice and enjoy. Nice one.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.