Brave are those who still have enough faith in turntables to make them their sole form of income. That applies both to manufacturers and distributors, specifically Maplenoll and the record player's UK distributor, Wollaton Audio. It's bad enough to scrape a living out of £250 decks of simple construction and deep user-friendliness. When you're talking air-bearings, whacko technology, fruitcake construction and four-figure price tags, well, you might just as well be selling heavy metal LPs to John Crabbe.

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The sweet folks from Wollaton -- and they are genuinely nice people -- turned up with the Maplenoll Ariadne, a two-speed, belt-drive unit costing £2959 in basic form. The review sample included 'extras' like a 500 foot hose reel, a 40lb per square inch 'super quiet' pump (which is super quiet only if placed on another planet), an additional air smoothing plenum, a 30lb all-lead platter and a lead record clamp. If the above list of goodies includes a few things you wouldn't normally associate with LP spinners, note that the Ariadne sports both an air bearing tonearm and an air bearing below the platter.

So much stuff was shlepped into my already-crowded listening room that I wanted to skip the review, but they had driven down from Nottingham to East Kent. Besides, Editor Harris actually thinks I get a kick out of Martian hi-fi. Suffice to say that the Ariadne turned my listening room into something half-hi-fi/half-fish tank. If I'd had any sense, I'd've hooked up my air-brush and painted a few models. The supplied pump really shifts atmosphere.

So Jeff Allen first plunks down a wooden box which looked like an external speaker for a 1930 Cossor Silvertone. This was merely for show; it disguised the air pump. Then he hooked up some clear tubing. What I thought was a case for fishing rods -- maybe he knew that a river flows by my studio -- turned out to be the plenum for ensuring smoother air delivery. This cylinder stretched across the floor, tubing from its other end hooked up to the Ariadne itself.

To be fair to Jeff, this was the lone UK sample, one which had been packed and unpacked and set up and dismantled more times than the sound rig on a G'n'R tour. So it looked slightly battered. But, road wear aside, it's one ugly bugger which looks home-made. This is not the way to win the heart of a reviewer who thinks that the Oracle Delphi is the minimum standard to which turntable makers should aspire and that Nikons feel 'cheap'.

Made out of what I think is marble, the Ariadne looked like a prototype. Especially the arm. Oh, the arm! It had more bits hanging off it than flesh falling from Freddy Kreuger, black painted nuts'n'bolts'n'rods, about as far from an SME V, a Graham or an Air Tangent as a Big Mac is from meat. And this, this bit stuck out at the back, snagging my clothing every time I needed to reach behind my pre-amp.

I was not amused. But the Allens are really sweet folks.

Jeff had the good sense to fit the thing with an AudioQuest AQ7000, one of my fave cartridges and not a million miles removed from certain other Oriental groove tracers which happen to reside in my system. He also supplied a spare arm tube. This pre-mounting cut down on the time needed for set-up, important because I thought that Jeff would roll out a sleeping bag before completing the assembly. Instead, he whizzed through it in under an hour, which almost made up for my belief that Rube Goldberg founded Maplenoll.

Not to suggest that Mrs Allen is frail, but I loaned some muscle to help heft the deck up onto the rack; it must weigh a hundred pounds. The Ariadne is therefore deader'n'a dodo, while the fat lead platter isn't exactly resonant. So, despite its agricultural-cum-neo-Grecian looks, it had the right structural integrity.

Parallel tracking arms frighten me not a bit, especially since Rabco went bust and air bearing jobs took over from chain-driven or belt-driven or friction-driven atrocities. But, and I'll never forgive dear Max Townshend for ruining two or three cherished LPs, I HATE TROUGHS FULL OF SILICON FLUID TRAVERSING MY DISCS. Being a fair-minded soul, I let Jeff fill the trough, provided that he replace my LPs should a mere speck of the stuff jump out and taint them forever.

You get the picture: this is one pain-in-the-tush deck if all you want to do is spin a few platters. First, you switch on the pump and then wait. No, you don't have to go out and jog a few laps before it reaches full pressure, but you'll have plenty of time to clean an LP on a VPI or a Moth before the platter raises above the plinth. Looking at an Ariadne in 'off' mode is disconcerting because the platter rests right on the plinth's upper surface. Only when enough air flows does it raise up microscopically.