Funk’s Klever

Funk Klever

From entry level all the way to the top, your LP12 is meant to be the best in extracting all the information from the groove. 

The shock is it’s not doing that. Junk’s getting in, and it’s audible. You’ve been trained to look at replay the wrong way. 

The doorway to your music isn’t the turntable, it’s the stylus, it’s your music maker.

Whatever the audible, damaging sources of junk are, they enter via the stylus. 

Funk’s Isolation Bubble is designed to stop junk reaching it. This way your music will sound closer to master tape. After all, that’s the sound the engineers at Linn records hear. But, you’re not hearing that, and there are good reasons.

Funk explains this using physics, and fixes it. 

It starts with LP12. It’s design is quite simple. Its playing dynamics aren’t.

Number one on the list of bad boys is the top plate mounted motor, where it’s always been. It’s the worst place for a motor on any suspended deck. Here’s why.

LP12 has a suspension, the sub-chassis moves, and when it does, it pulls against the motor via the belt. You might think we’re talking about varying belt tension, but it’s far worse. The belt is a bridge connecting the motor to the platter, and exactly opposite the motor is the freely mounted cartridge. 

Plinths, and hence the motor, experience junk. The belt passes this on through to the cartridge, which as the arm is free to swing side to side,  generates unwanted signals from the cartridge. Simple bad news, and it’s been going on for 40 years.

(Feel free to throw in varying belt tension at this point should you wish).

Funk’s Klever fixes this by taking the motor off the top plate. An ultra-low vibration K-Drive driven motor is now mounted onto the sub-chassis – it’s designed to fit any LP12 subchassis. Now, where the sub-chassis goes, the motor goes. We’ve broken the short circuit and this cleans the music up. Plus, there’s no belt tension variation.  

Pink Triangle did this back in the 80s! It’s has simply been ignored.

It works, yet you’ve not been told about it. Is it a case of “Not designed here”?

(Funk has a two-motor setup that allowing you to hear this for yourself).

What makes this all the more clever is that by doing this, it improves isolation by removing the need for the semi-tight special Linn able dressing. 

(To understand this fully, the math is more involved. This isn’t pseudoscience or smoke. It results from the more complex playing dynamics. For those interested, the details can be found in a white paper which can be found on the website. It’s a really quite fascinating story.)

Funk’s Klever is just part of Funk Isolation Bubble for LP12.

For 40 years, LP12 has steadfastly defended its use of the felt mat. Felt was used back in the day of Ford’s Model T. 

The felt mat is an actual barrier to getting that sublime tape sound, and it’s not hard to see why. The mat just 2mm away from the stylus, which is pile-driving the groove at over 20,000G, releasing lots of energy into the disc. Felt reflects the energy back to the stylus, and the cartridge outputs more junk.  

Prevent that reflection and we’ve blown away yet more smoke. 

Factual information is available in the isolation Bubble document on the website. A  video on mats is in preparation to be released later in 2025.

Using physics and technology, Funk’s APM is a mat designed for the 21st century. It’s another step closer to master tape sound.

The stylus is still our focus, the next is unquestionably the worst component in audio. It’s the arm. It’s responsible for shaking the cartridge while its playing, which seems strange given this universal statement by manufacturers: Arms are rigid. 

The reality is, they’re anything but. 

Look around at all arms, yes, even yours. It’s fair to say over 99% are “just tubes”, and any tube vibrates like a windchime, and you’ve been taught to firmly bolt your cartridge to it. Do that and if the tube is indeed vibrating, it can’t help but also vibrate and generate junk. That’s why every time you change an arm the sound changes. 

If the arm was rigid, unlike a windchime, it wouldn’t ring. When measured, a rigid arm will measure flat. When all these arms are measured, they exhibit massive spikes ranging from 20dB to 45dB and all in the audio band. 20-45dB? You wouldn’t buy a speaker with that response. The carbon arm used on LP12’s entry model has a resonance of 40dB. Other arms aren’t that much better.

full details can be found in the isolation Bubble document. There’ll also be a full video on arms to be released shortly. 

The bad news is spending money is no assurance of performance. It just makes the tills ring. The good news? Finding out you have a problem is when you can start to fix it.

These arms are just another block to getting master tape sound and your LP12 deserves the best. Using physics and sound engineering, Funk’s range of arms employ a technology called F•X and it deals with resonance.  

FX5, Funk entry level arm, FX5 has a maximum resonance of just some 9dB. 9dB v 40dB. You decide.

Funk’s FX3 peaks at just 6dB, and it costs half the price of Ekos SE. 

If you truly want the best, actual flagship performance, Funk’s has two top arms: