Mat Weisfeld, son of company founders Harry and Sheila Weisfeld, grew up at VPI. While he didnt originally plan on following this path, it became the love he didnt realize he had (next to his wife Jane). Mat has taken the strong foundation and VPI tradition created by his parents and has continued to grow and improve the company with new technology, lean manufacturing and more.

ListenUp: What are the benefits of a direct-drive turntable?

WEISFELD: Because the direct-drive is dead accurate on the speed, you get that natural reproduction of the recording. In our case, its dead quiet because of how we engineered it. Its as musical as can be, its dead quiet, it sounds natural, and when you hear it, youre just like, Wow, its like Im listening to a master tape over here.

ListenUp: What can you tell us about your 40th anniversary special edition HW-40 turntable?

WEISFELD: With our 40th anniversary, we wanted to basically pay tribute to where VPI started, where weve gone and all that fun stuff. And essentially my dads first turntable, a lot of people think it was the HW-19, but it was actually the HW-9. The HW-9 was an isolation base made for the old Denon direct-drive motors. And Harry started making it. He was one of those crazy guys that comes over and says, Hey, Im making something in my basement that I think youll really like, except in this case it actually worked! I dont know the exact story, but essentially the rep from Denon met my dad and was like, This is amazing. We want to use it. Denon showed it at CES, using this guy from Brooklyns isolation base HW-9, and it worked out beautifully. The first VPI table was a direct-drive motor, isolation base and a gimbal tonearm with hinged dust cover. Thats why for the HW-40, we wanted to do the same concept, but this time with our own direct-drive motor, our own gimbal tonearm, dust cover, isolation base, all that stuff. Just to show the technology and how far weve come as a company.