Auditorium 23 Turntable Mat

Auditorium 23 is a German company that has been around for quite a long time. Their main business is very expensive speakers, mostly using a horn type design. They also make phono step up transformers and cables.

There is virtually no information available about the composition of their two mats. Even the company who imports them into the US could tell us very little about them other than they experiment with different materials and use listening tests to come up with the best sound.

The Auditorium 23 mat, at first glance, looks like a normal felt mat. We weighed and measured all of these and the great news is, it is very close in weight and thickness to almost every stock felt mat on the market. It only weighs 56 grams and is 1.1 mm thick, which is really close to the average felt mat thickness of 1.5 mm. This means you will not have to adjust your tonearm height or worry about it being too heavy — all great news.

This mat is definitely two sided. The top side has an ever so slightly raised cross hatch pattern on it. If you look closely, you can see each of the cross hatches has a woven pattern in it and the area around them has a different woven pattern. The back of the mat is flat with the same type of woven pattern you see in between the cross hatch pattern on the top. This mat flops around a little bit less than a typical felt mat, but obviously, with its unique construction, is not just a standard felt mat. It does not feel as soft as a felt mat and almost feels like there is a tiny bit of stiffness woven in. But since it is similar in material to a felt mat, it should be a perfect upgrade over your stock felt mat.

We had zero cases of this mat sticking to a record from static cling which is great. It might tend to grab some of the dust that is on your record, but for some reason, those tiny specs will stay on the mat and not transfer to another record, at least in our observations. We were able to brush these off with an inexpensive carbon fiber brush or the type of brush you might clean a pool table with. It was far easier to brush off than a regular felt mat.

With the Auditorium 23 mat having almost identical physical characteristics to a stock felt mat and the elimination of static cling and dust transfer, that alone makes it worth the price of admission for most turntables. But as an added bonus, to our ears, it also improved the audio. We heard an improvement in dynamics and a bit more separation between instruments and some turntables but on others, the difference jumped out even more Even if we had heard no change, if you have static problems and don’t want to be concerned about changing the character of the design of your turntable, this mat is an outstanding choice!

Learn more about reducing static in your turntable