Creek has long been a stalwart of affordable and compact electronics, so it was something of a surprise to come across a turntable in the company's booth at the Munich show in May. This wasn't just an entry-level job either, but an acrylic beauty with multiple drive belts and an outboard power supply.

Mike Creek has dubbed the deck, Wyndsor, in honour of his father's audio business where Mike got his start in the industry.

The Wyndsor, it turns out, was inspired by a number of factors, not least the fact that Creek's Chinese factory has the ability to turn out high-quality components with relative ease. Some of the ideas come from an equipment rack that the company makes, while others are Mike's engineering solutions.

The Wyndsor is based around a slab of black acrylic which has three substantial turned feet with spikes bolted in. These chunky feet from the AR4 equipment rack have rubber washers to provide some isolation, they also offer height adjustment for levelling the turntable -but this changes the relative angle of platter and motor pulley, so you are better off levelling the supporting surface.

Free standing motor

The motor sits in a free standing housing that is very nicely finished in anodised aluminium, it has rubber feet to reduce energy transmission into the equipment rack and an acrylic spindle to drive the three belts. There is also an on/off switch on top, plus you can also stop and start the motor from the separate power supply box, although it's certainly more convenient to have a switch on the turntable itself.

The motor is an AC synchronous type running at 24 volts and the power supply has an oscillator which allows fine tuning of the turntable speed via separate knobs for 33.3 and 45rpm. These seem a little on the accessible side considering how often they are likely to be tweaked.

There is also plenty of potential for accidentally turning one, but given that Creek supplies a strobe disc (and all you need is a focused mains lamp to read it) fine tuning the speed is pretty straightforward. The motor has a fixed cable that plugs into the supply and this lead is long enough to make PSU placement easier. If you use the same RPM speed there's no real need to have access to the PSU at all, but it does look nice.