In his Mystere brochure and designer notes, Hartmut Roemer describes at length why the Mystere design explicitly does not employ conventional damping materials nor mass-damping principles often found in current high-end turntable designs. According to his research, these cause complex time-smearing and overtone deformation and obfuscating due to undesirable energy storage and delayed release effects. Information regarding the alternative technologies and materials employed in the Mystere towards this goal are unfortunately not publicised. Quite the opposite: we were kindly asked to not explicitly highlight certain technologies of the Mystere turntable system in our photos. Having followed the brand for over 15 years, I have come to make my peace with this information policy, as I have found Lumen White products to speak for themselves where it really counts—design excellence and sonic performance.

Once the Mystere turntable and its controller/compressor unit had made it into my listening room, their assembly was a children's game:  Simply connect the approximately 2 meter long combined air-pipe and control cable assembly to the corresponding three connectors on the compressor/controller unit, and you are ready to go. The length of the cable assembly suggests the latter was designed for placement in the listening room, which was confirmed in practice, as the compressor works extremely silently, or close to noiseless. The compressor-controller unit features a power switch above its IEC-power plug, while the turntable itself has a standby switch. After switch on, the system takes a moment to build the air-pressure while the system completes several test- and safety routines, before it indicates—via a color-change of the turntable's speed selection knobs—that its ready to play.

After the tonearm has been mounted, Lumen White's high tech machine is as easy to use as, for example, a Thorens TD126. The only thing the Mystere is choosy about is warped records. The turntable's clamp intentionally does not feature any screw-down mechanism and hence will not force-flatten strongly warped records. That said, forced clamping, as, for example, found on my LaGrange turntable, doubtlessly causes considerable tension in the records' material, which poses legitimate questions regarding possible sonic consequences. As regards warped records, I would expect any potential Mystere buyer to already own or be willing to acquire a record flattener to take care of them.

To warm up my system, I listened to Art Farmer and Jim Hall's Big Blues record and was immediately struck by the power which the Mystere, Thales, and Lyra Etna combination brought to the music's micro- and macro-dynamics, and by a so-far-unheard impact and precision in the reproduction of transients. This extra energy projection persisted after I exchanged the Etna cartridge for an Lyra Olympus. After having spent considerable time studying the Mystere's technical design, I tend to attribute these outstanding dynamic capabilities to its custom motor's enormous torque. That said, for a few years now I have made it a policy not to try and link specific sonic attributes of an audio component to a single one of its technical features as, fortunately, neither the reproduction nor the perception of music are mono-causal phenomena. Hence, I prefer to describe my listening impressions without the invocation of any such single-track technological interpretations. The Mystere simply excels in reproducing even intimately known records in a superior fashion by uncovering more of their dynamic and rhythmic content than pretty much all other turntables I know. Whether this capability is due to its high torque drive train or possibly the result of a superior freedom from parasitic resonances may have to remain an open question. Obvious however, is the pitch-black background of silence from which the Mystere makes all notes emerge.