WHAT is LITTLE FWEND?
A great turntable is almost always manual. Little Fwend s 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.
Little Fwend is the automatic tonearm lifter with one mission; to save your cartridge from unnecessary wear.
It does it safely. It does it smoothly. It does it looking good.
Little Fwend has provided turntable-owners with peace of mind since 2015. 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 the disturbances of everyday life, coffee is ready, a drifting thought and - voila….did I turn off the record player at all? Not that we are trying to sow the seed of fear, but raise your hand if you have not once forgot you´re playing a record - or fallen asleep in the listening room.
Worst case scenario (I have experienced this with light tracking cartridges a couple of times). Due to several hours of accumulated dust, there comes a point where this build-up will sneak up between the cantilever tip and the groove and, oops, it looses friction and ends up grinding a track in 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 the Lyra.
Little fwend low
LITTLE FWEND HIGH
LITTLE FWEND disco
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
We are two kinds. The other kind is fine with the sound from delicate styli trapped in the dark inner circle of a vinyl record. Once upon a time in Japan, there was a device that took care of business. This device is now long gone, disappeared into the twilight of the black market. We wondered. Why? It was not an aesthetic masterpiece, but the mechanics functioned reasonably well.
Inspired by this servant of the peaceful mind, we set out on a journey to design an automatic tonearm lifter that filled the void - and then some.
We reverse-engineered the cheapish moulded plastic and aluminium lifter and found that their design had user adjustable triggering sensitivity, which in this case is a short cut in the design process. Why not aim for designing 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, but we ended up with a good compromise: Your cantilever and stylus 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 cartridge. In 99.9768% of the cases you will never experience this, but there have been a handful of cases along the years (of 4000 sold) where this have happened resulting in a return for replacement and still a happy customer. 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, but now & then there is the odd black sheep.
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 often come to the conclusion: why (try to) make a tonearm/weight/brush/etc etc that is not special or not the best in its class? Why make a copy of a copy without bringing some form of progress to the table or look at a problem in a new light? Might as well design toilet paper. OK, these are first world problems, it´s only Audiophilia Nervosa and will certainly not save the world, but the point being: We wanted Little Fwend to be as thoughtfully designed as possible, feel smooth and safe and be as user-fwendly as a mechanical gadget can be. You will get from A to B in the Toyota, but the (fill in Premium German Brand) might make it a more enjoyable ride.
MADE IN SCANDINAVIA
We decided early on to get the metal parts machined where they were enthusiastic and cared deeply about high-quality work. That was not possible in Norway at the time, this was before the crash in oil prices, so guess they had butter on the table and couldn´t be bothered. We tried the Swiss watch making industry, but they just laughed. The Germans thought we were too small fish, but the Danes took us in like an orphan on the doorstep. Our Danish precision machining facility used to do tonearm parts for Bang & Olufsen in the 1970s, so we felt the stars were aligned.
Assembly, hand-tuning of every single unit and quality control is done at the Little Fwend Lab in Oslo, Norway. Our new packaging box come from Sweden, så javisst ja, we’re proudly Made in Scandinavia.
