I had a long chat with Tareeq last evening. I found him a very knowledgeable, open, transparent person in the chat, someone I'd tend to trust quickly. I asked him about his turntables and I'm writing down here what I learned. Remember that I'm not very knowledgeable about turntables myself.
I later read
https://www.hifivision.com/threads/advice-required-on-turntable.84950/post-948912 and most of the details given there match what Tareeq shared.
His plinth is made of solid wood, and it has springs and a metal baseplate below. The springs ensure very high vibration isolation from the surface on which the TT is kept. He says he went checking to see which VPI TT would give this sort of sprung suspension and he found only those VPI models which exceed Rs.12 lakh offer this feature.
The motor is DC and is imported from a good Swiss manufacturer which also supplies similar motors to the defence sector. This motor is rated at 25-27W. It's controlled through a circuit board which EBI Audio has developed, which uses a microcontroller and quartz oscillator for essentially zero drift. All his drive systems are three speed, he said. (On his website I think I saw photos of two-speed switches, but his website is old, he said, so there are many updates to his designs.) The belt is imported straight from VPI. The motor assembly sits separate from the main plinth, no vibration pass-through.
The platter: he's tried 60mm and 100mm acrylic platters, and now he's stabilised on a 60mm aluminium platter which weighs 12kg. So, unless otherwise stated, all his current models come with this platter. The bearing used to be a stainless steel shaft, but I think he said he's now upgrading to a ceramic bearing. I forgot to ask how he does testing and verification of the dynamic balance of the platter. (All precision rotating items need dynamic balancing to ensure low vibration. This is exactly what car wheels get when we do "wheel balancing".)
The tonearms are interesting. His recent builds have had tonearms made of African ebony wood, through which he's drilled a hole and inserted a copper tube, and the cabling runs through this tube. This provides good shielding he said. He's now shifting to carbon fibre tonearm tubes, which will help him bring down the effective mass to 11g, and allow you to use just about any MC cart.
BTW, he seems to think entirely MC, never MM. From his words one gets the impression that he doesn't worry about how MM carts perform on his turntable, he focuses on just MC.
His tonearms have a "knife edge" bearing, he said. I don't know much about this, I just heard the term. He said that if a buyer asks for a ceramic bearing, he can get that too. The tonearms have a VTA adjustment facility, they can be raised and lowered. They have anti-skating force adjustment too, at the bottom. I don't know the details, though I asked and he explained. I know he said that it's not a thread-and-weight device, nor is it a magnetic setup like the Clearaudio Satisfy Kardan. The headshell isn't easily detachable. He prefers that the buyer doesn't replace headshells often, just fits a cart and uses it that way. The cable which emerges from the tonearm is offered with a 5-pin DIN socket by default, but he can offer with RCA or XLR too. We chatted a bit about how an MC cart's output is balanced by default, so it's easy to hook it up through an XLR socket to a phono preamp with balanced inputs.
His tonearms all have effective length of 305mm. We who look at other branded TT know very well how much premium these brands charge for a 12" tonearm, God knows why. And this person offers nothing shorter than 12". He can arrange space on the plinth and fit a Q-up type of tonearm lifter if you want, but he'll not make the Q-up device himself, he'll buy and fit one, because these things are mass produced and if he had to fabricate them, they'd be more expensive.
He can make a TT for you with two tonearms straight out of the box, if you wish.
The pricing I got from him is about 1.8L to 2L for a TT with what he considers the current standard choices, with aluminium platter, ebony wood tonearm. No cartridge.
He also makes carts, for mono, or 78RPM, or normal stereo. All his carts are MC. Prices range from 30K to roughly 2L, he said, but I'm sure the prices will vary and it's best to check with him for specifics. The overall impression I got is that he's very familiar with commercial multi-lakh-rupee TT performance with MC carts, and he aims to compete only against that high end segment. His TT business is picking up, and he's not getting time to update his website.
I have absolutely no affiliation with him. I just found his story quite awe-inspiring, so I'm noting it all down.
