Totem and JP, As you also may be able to glean from reading Halcro's and my recent posts, a few years ago I was able to find and buy about 10 samples of the SC3042. In the last few weeks, I sent two of them to a fellow aficionado in Germany, known to us as "Thuchan". Thuchan had evidently purchased a broken TT101 with Halcro's help, and his tech determined that it needed replacement of SC3042. Until this recent episode, I had no idea whether the chips I bought (from a vendor in Hong Kong) were genuine or even in operating condition, but Thuchan's tech got his TT101 up and running perfectly by virture of installing the chip I sent. This is great news for me as well, because I have more SC3042 chips on hand. (By the way, I think they are still available from China and Hong Kong.)
My own TT101 has been "broken" too, since purchase about 3-4 years ago. For that reason, I got it at a low price, approximately the value of the tonearm that came with it. I happen to live very close to Bill Thalmann's shop in terms of highway driving, and Bill early on replaced all the electrolytics in my unit. However, in Bill's shop, once the lytics were replaced, the TT101 refused to misbehave. It worked perfectly on each of two visits to the shop. In my house, it worked only intermittently, and every time I began to feel confident about it, it would go "on the fritz". I tried all sorts of black magic to no permanent avail. Then I started to try to trouble-shoot it myself. Suffice to say that in the process of trying to fix it, I converted the intermittent problem to a permanent and consistent problem. Also, I am pretty sure at least that the problem is local to the PCB that contains the SC3042, although I lack the expertise to prove it's the SC3042. (There's more than one chip on that board, and the others are not SC3042s.) However, Thuchan's tech tells us that his unit was misbehaving in a way similar to mine, so now I have hope that replacing the SC3042 may finally fix it. How's that for a saga?
Bill worked on my SP10 Mk3 and on my Denon DP80. He's a great guy, and we are lucky to have him. Now that my TT101 is reliably malfunctioning, I hope to take it back to him for the 3rd time to finally trouble-shoot it. Either that or I may send it to Thuchan's tech in Germany, if the postage is not prohibitive in cost.
JP, Are you in the DMV area? I'm watching snow accumulate on my car outside.
I do think there would be interest in an SC3042 PCB re-creation, certainly on my part and especially if the discrete circuit can outperform the chip.
