The original AR arm was pretty bad. In the 80's people started cutting it off the subchassis and putting on a different arm. George Merrill came up with some great mods for the table, employing some methods he uses to this day on his own table.
What is the fascination?
I have to ask what is the fascination with these older turntables? I recently listened to an older SP 10 MKII with a Jelco and Older SME arm with Koetsu and Stanton cartridges. The sound was very good I will admit but I cannot say it was better than the 1200G or even a 1200GR for that matter. Heck even the Rega RP 8 is really an amazing sounding turntable for the money and they are brand new. These tables are coming up on 40 plus years old. One forum contributor said a turntable should not have any sound at all. I agree and the newer tables get closer to that "no sound" than many of these colored (smooth, warm) sounding turntables I recently purchased a Pickering ESV 3000 MM cartridge that arrived in the mail yesterday and I had to ask myself, "what am I doing?" So with that being said, why the fascination? If one want to change the sound of the table, start with the cartridge, they all do sound different. Nowadays the tables and arms are so good and engineered based on the earlier designs and bettered. Also, when you buy say an older used arm, how do you know its been cared for? Arms bearings can be screwed up pretty bad when one tries to tighten cartridges with the headshell attached to the tonearm or the tonearm mounted on the table and many people do not even know they are destroying their arms bearings so I mean you really have to know who you are getting the arm from and check the bearings etc. There is a lot of risk with turntables, much more than with any components because of so many moving parts that do get old and break. Why the fascination?
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Cleeds. Here is the thread about building great turntable at a low cost. Notice that this is the second thread about building cheap TT. The first had already gone viral. https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/building-high-end-tables-cheap-at-home-despot-ii |
If you want to buy a new turntable, fine. I choose to use my superior intellect and arcane knowledge to identify a dusty old turntable from a grandfather's closet, cleverly re-engineer several parts, and install a vintage cart with a custom stylus cut to my specs (sorry, I can't share them). Through wit and industry I am quite wealthy, and can well afford to pay 2 - 3 times as much to refurbish a vintage table than to just buy a modern one that you plug in and it works. |
Can you say, "dripping with sarcasm"? kahlenz, You are more elitist than you know. Expense-wise, it’s just the other way around. A basically high quality vintage turntable (usually not to be found in any grandfather’s closet), if properly refurbished and usually re-plinthed, will get you more bang for the buck than a comparable new turntable. That’s the whole point. To achieve that end, you do have to be in a DIY frame of mind. If you farm out the work to any of several competent professionals, you will have to pay extra for their time and skillset. That’s the way this cookie crumbles. This IS a hobby, after all; "you pays your money and you takes yer choice". I’ve got about $800 in my refurbished Denon DP80 and less than $1000 in my Victor TT101. I’ve got a little over $1200 in my Lenco, including the cost of the Phoenix Engineering motor controller. These costs also include all electronic work done on them (mostly by me; some by professionals), all parts bought for them, and the creation of plinths of my own design for them out of slate or of other materials. Any of these 3 will compare favorably to commercially available turntables at over $5000. (At least that's my opinion, based on owning commercially available turntables for the previous 35 years or so, before I got into this aspect of the hobby about 7-8 years ago, and on lots of listening to other systems fed by turntables costing up to $25,000.) |
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