From its entry level all the way to the top, the LP12 carries a particular promise: that it is extracting everything from the groove, that nothing musical is being left behind. It is a promise that has sustained genuine devotion for half a century, and it is one we respect enormously.
The difficulty is that it is not quite true. Junk is getting in, and it is audible. And the reason most LP12 owners have not identified it is that they have been trained to look at replay the wrong way.
The doorway to your music is not the turntable itself — it is the stylus. The stylus is your music maker. Whatever audible, damaging sources of interference exist in the system, they enter through that tiny contact point. Funk's Isolation Bubble is designed to stop that junk from reaching it, so that what the stylus recovers sounds closer to the master tape — the sound the engineers at Linn Records were working to when they made the albums you love. Right now, that sound is not what you're hearing, and there are specific, physical reasons why.
The Motor Problem
The LP12's design is straightforward. Its playing dynamics are considerably less so, and the biggest culprit has been sitting in the same place since the beginning: the top-plate mounted motor.
On a suspended turntable like the LP12, the sub-chassis moves — it is designed to move, that is the isolation principle. But when the sub-chassis moves, it pulls against the motor through the belt. This is not merely a matter of belt tension fluctuating, though that would be bad enough. The belt is a direct bridge between the motor — anchored to the plinth, receiving and transmitting whatever mechanical noise the plinth carries — and the platter, directly below the cartridge. The cartridge, mounted on a freely swinging arm, is exquisitely sensitive to exactly the kind of lateral energy the belt is delivering. This has been happening on every LP12 ever built. It has been happening for forty years.
The Klever Fix
Funk's Klever resolves this by removing the motor from the top plate entirely. An ultra-low vibration K-Drive motor is now mounted directly onto the sub-chassis — engineered to fit any LP12 sub-chassis without modification. The consequence is simple and significant: wherever the sub-chassis goes, the motor goes with it. The short circuit between motor vibration and cartridge is broken. Belt tension variation is eliminated. The motor is no longer a conduit for plinth noise into the signal path.
Pink Triangle understood this in the 1980s and built their decks accordingly. The solution has simply been ignored in the mainstream — possibly for reasons that have more to do with the economics of established platforms than with physics. Funk's Klever does not ignore it. A further benefit, quietly significant, is that removing the top-plate motor also eliminates the need for the carefully managed, semi-tight cable dressing that LP12 owners know well — improving overall isolation as a consequence.
The Mat Matters Too
While the motor has been the most significant structural problem, the felt mat deserves its own reckoning. LP12 has defended the felt mat for four decades. Felt was the material available and acceptable at the time of the Ford Model T. The reasons to persist with it in a modern, high-performance context are difficult to justify.
The mat sits just 2mm from the stylus as it pile-drives the groove at over 20,000G, releasing enormous energy into the disc. Felt reflects that energy straight back to the stylus, and the cartridge outputs the reflection as unwanted signal layered over the music. Remove the reflection — using physics and technology rather than tradition — and another layer of obscurity is stripped away. Funk's APM is a mat designed for the 21st century, and the difference it makes is not subtle.
The Arm: The Worst Component in Audio
The stylus remains the focus. But no account of LP12 performance is complete without addressing what is, in our assessment, the worst component category in audio: the tonearm.
Arms are universally described by their manufacturers as rigid. They are not. A tube is a tube, and any tube vibrates — it resonates like a windchime when energised. Measured honestly, arms described as rigid display massive resonance peaks ranging from 20dB to 45dB, all within the audio band. The carbon arm used on the LP12's entry-level model has a measured resonance of 40dB. Other arms, including much more expensive options, are not substantially better. Spending significantly more money is no guarantee of improvement — it simply means the problem costs more.
Funk's range of arms employs a technology called F•X, which addresses resonance through applied physics rather than wishful thinking. The FX5, our entry-level arm, has a maximum resonance of just 9dB. Nine decibels against forty — the gap is not close. The FX3 peaks at just 6dB and costs half the price of an Ekos SE. The numbers tell the story plainly enough.
Funk's Klever is not a single product. It is one part of a comprehensive Isolation Bubble approach to the LP12 — a coherent system of fixes applied to a platform that deserves better than the compromises it has always lived with.