Aside from Mingering Mike, the other bit of turntable-related posting I’ve been meaning to do concerns Sean Duffy. Back in November I did a post about one of Duffy’s pieces (above left), which as you can see is a turntable with three tone-arms. In that post I mentioned Janek Schaeffer, who has also been using tri-tone arm turntables for ten years now. Here’s the relevant bits:
…I hope Duffy [is] familiar with Janek Schaefer, a sound artist/DJ who has been using a Tri-Phonic Turntable (above right) since 1997. Two of the tone arms on Schaefer's turntable face one direction and the third plays in reverse; he can also reverse the direction of the turntable itself and therefore invert the 2:1. What's more, he can stack records on top of each other, playing three records simultaneously on one turntable.… I'm not familiar with Duffy's work, and a cursory google seems to point to many other projects (turntable-related and not), but this one, at least, has been done (and better). Duffy's looks better, but on a purely functional level Schaefer's is far more interesting.
Well, two months after that post, Duffy came across it and he emailed me. With his permission—myself two months late!—here is his response:
Yes, I know who Janek Schaefer is. I discovered his work a year or so after I made my first turntable in 1999. Although I've never see it in person, it looks interesting. And I agree his work is definitely more functional and mine looks better.
I don't know who else knows about Schaefer but it seems like every time I show one of my turntables someone brings up a different person whose done something along these lines. Maybe it'll become a movement all it's own.
Well, I’ve now made three posts about turntable art—so you may be right! I hadn’t realized that Duffy had been making his turntable pieces for such a long time. And we both agree the purpose of Duffy’s work is very different from that of Schaefer. Duffy also pointed out an error in my post: just because one of Schaefer’s tone arms is reversed does not mean that the sound comes out reversed. My mistake. And that wasn't all! He continued to school me.
The multi-tone-armed turntable goes back to the 1940s when people would put extra tone-arms on their turntables for different cartridges (78, mono and later stereo). Most radio stations had them and some companies manufactured them. Actually most audiophile turntable made today are set up to use more than one tone-arm. I first played with one of these machines in the 1980s.
Here are a couple of photographs of these turntables. 
Duffy pointed also pointed me to this website. Thanks Sean for the response. Those of you in Arizona can see Duffy's installation, The Grove, on view at the ASU Nelson Fine Arts Center beginning June 2.
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