What is Little Fwend?
A serious turntable is almost always manual.
Little Fwend is mounted on your turntable and set up to trigger a lifting mechanism that raises your tonearm and stylus above the surface of the record after the music inevitably fades out. It is 100% mechanical and will not affect the audio signal in any way.
Little Fwend has provided customers with peace of mind since 2016. Some use rare or expensive cartridges they want to keep from unnecessary wear, others just think the sound of the run-out groove is annoying to wake up to.
If you are the type that listens to music in a mindful and focused fashion, that is great - but sometimes life happens, a drifting thought or someone calling on your attention and two hours later you wonder if you turned the turntable off at all. Not that we are trying to sow seeds of fear, but raise your hand if you have not once got distracted when playing a record - or fallen asleep in the listening room.
While we´re at the subject of fear - let´s look into a worst case scenario. I have experienced this with light tracking cartridges a couple of times at the summer cabin while moving the lawn or coming back after a swim. Due to several hours of accumulated dust, there comes a point where this dust build-up will sneak up between the cantilever tip and the groove. After a while the stylus could loose tracking in the locked groove and end up grinding the paper label (which obviously is very bad for your diamonds future prospects. Luckily, in my case, both instances were with a Shure V15, and not the Koetsu or Lyra at home.
I got an email praising his Little Fwend. A customer told me that while reading a book in the mountain cabin three hours drive from home, a thought entered his mind: “Did I turn off the stereo when I left Friday afternoon?”. When returning home Sunday night, the listening room was very hot from the glowing tube amps and the turntable was quietly spinning. His Air Tight PC-1 had been lifted up by the Little Fwend, so no damage done.
The precious diamond at the end of the cantilever has a useful life of 1000-2000 hours before it needs to be retipped. There is no point in wearing this out prematurely if you can easily avoid it. The cost of retipping is not the worst part (unless it´s a Lyra or Koetsu etc.), but the months of wait time at the manufacturer or retipping service where you´re (most likely most played favourite) cartridge is waiting in line to undergo surgery.
Design philosophy
In 2014, I won the highest bid among 42 bidders on eBay (USD260). The auction was for the Audio Technica AT6006 Safety Raiser. This was a quite good Japanese automatic tonearm lifter that was discontinued at the time. It had its downsides, it was not always reliable and the annoying sticky pads it was mounted on made it difficult to readjust the trigger point and height setting while stuck to the turntable.
I started thinking about why there was not a really good automatic tonearm lifter on the market. We reverse-engineered this cheapish moulded plastic and aluminium lifter and found that their design also had user adjustable triggering sensitivity, which in this case is a short cut in the design process. Why not design in the perfect sensitivity? Maybe they gave up and just let the customer end up with the responsibilty of tweaking this parameter?
We made seven prototypes with various spring forces vs the frictional relationship between moving surfaces. Not to go all the way down into the wabbit hole with details, but we ended up with a good compromise: Your stylus and cantilever assembly will meet as little lateral resistance as possible, then trigger. At the same time, it needs to stay loaded and ready for action without triggering prematurely. This balance is very delicate, and we could have played it safe and made it harder to trigger and hence, the chance of premature triggering would be zero. We went for the risky option for us and the best for your sensitive cantilever assembly. In 99.9768% of the cases you will never experience any issues, but there have been a handful of cases along the years (of over 5000 sold) where this have happened resulting in a return for replacement and still a happy customer.
For the mounting arrangement we found a solution that is unique to Little Fwend. We simply have a magnet in the base, so you adhere a magnetic metal disc on your turntable and attach the Little Fwend on top. This makes it very easy to reorient the trigger antenna if you want it to trigger earlier or later in the run-out groove of a specific record - you simply rotate it on top of the magnetic mounting disc. You can also lift the fwend off the turntable and readjust the height while holding it in your hands, which is much easier than the hassle of micro adjustments in tight spaces.
Made in Scandinavia
We machine the Little Fwend parts at a precision machining shop in Denmark to much tighter tolerances that any of the other tonearm lifters available. The mechanism inside is optimized to lift very smoothly and to have just the right force to push the tonearm upwards in a controlled manner. There is no oil or grease that can leak or dry out. The only lubricant we use is an extremely expensive Fluorocarbon damping gel from NYE Lubricants (of course…NASA are also using it). Unlike oils or standard lubricants, this damping gel is guaranteed to not shift from the frictional surfaces where they are applied for at least 20 years (in temperatures -20/+60C). The jury is still out about it´s longevity, guess we´ll find out in the future.
Every single unit is assembled and fine tuned by hand in Norway and tested for function before shipping out. I personally do the quality control and testing on every unit.
We could have made a cheap plastic knock-off or a garage made one that customers hate a few months down the line, but then I would not sleep well at night. We have thought about designing other products for turntables, but why make a copy of a copy without bringing some form of progress to the table or look at a challenge in a new light? Might as well design toilet paper. OK, these are first world problems, it´s only Audiophilia Nervosa and we will certainly not save the world, but the point is:
We wanted Little Fwend to be as thoughtfully designed as possible, feel smooth, be safe and reliable and be as user friendly as a mechanical gadget can be.
You will get from A to B in a Toyota, but a (fill in Premium German Brand) might make it a more enjoyable ride.
Lasse Gretland