Hi Mike, yes indeedy the AI 800 MKIII has an easy musicality, liveliness and fluidity which complements the Klipsch very well, sounding very smooth, AND produces some quite serious bass! It has a Beauty which reminds me of the Ortofon M15E Super, redolent of red wine and fires in the hearth in winter. I'll be making this set-up my mainstay for quite a while.
Hi Billybuck, I had reported a while back one of my audio buddies up here sold his 80-pound Technics SP10MKII, saying he no longer felt anything for it. Even before the Lenco reached its Giant phase, he would invite me over to hear just how much superior the 40-pound Lenco was to his Technics. I also owned and rebuilt an SP10 MKII to find out if it too could Crush belt-drives as easily as the Lenco, and if it were indeed a threat to the Idler Supremacy. It wasn't and I sold it. And Lencos have defeated EMT DDs, the best ever built. But if you think about it, the DDs are MORE complex, not simpler, as they require complex circuitry in order to work, and once these go - and they always do go - the 'table is toast, though one or two experts may exist in the world who can repair them.
The Lencos are in fact about the simplest and most reliable 'tables out there, far simpler mechanically than the Garrards, and so repairable by the amateur, and the wheels apparently last forever, provided they are the metal ones. However, you seem to have found one of the very few lemons ever reported, so don't let that one bad experience colour your views of the Lenco. If a Lenco is in good shape when it is first bought (and they almost always are), and has the metal wheel, then after proper restoration it will perform dependably for decades more. A friend of mine got the first one I ever rebuilt after my return to Canada (the Oak Lenco under my "system"), and six years on he still uses it without problem, needing only a dusting once in all that time to continue to play perfectly: his wife uses it frequently. I am now retrofitting the various mods/improvements (except mass of course) to it. I would advise you to abandon the Lenco you have, find a good one, and apply all you've learned to it. Once finished, the wheel will never need replacing (unlike a belt or thread), the motor will run for decades, and even the "ON" switch, which consists of a silver barbell and a spring, will last forever. The plinth, of course, doesn't wear out or go out of adjustment either.
Welcome to the ranks of the Lenco Initiates Glenn!! If everyone had had a quality idler instead of a crappy belt-drive (and by this I don't necessarily mean ALL belt-drives are crappy - though in the context of idlers....;-) - but the cheap ones were and are execrable) when CD made its first appearance, digital would have been laughed off the world stage and would today be analyzed as one of the greatest PR (and technological) failures of ALL Time!! One [apparently small and meaningless] Evil (the collusion between press and industry to lionize the cheaper-to-manufacture belt-drive) gives birth to others. Now we have MP3, the concept of "Quality" is fading from Western consciousness, it is Fast Food everything. Good thing even without exposure to the concept of Quality (and integrity, and ethics) some seem to have an innate knowledge of these things. Anyway, the lessons aren't done yet: it takes quite a while to absorb all the lessons of the Mighty Lenco. Your sensitivity to PRaT will increase, along with gestalt and harmony (which high-end belt-drivers and worse, the Digital crowd, claim to understand, like dessicated 90-year-old scholars discussing the concept of Sex...these definitely need the lessons Idlers can teach them), and all the musical secrets which lie engraved in those licorice pizzas will slowly be dragged out into the light to amaze, delight and enlighten you for decades to come!! Vive la Lenco, Vive la Idler Wheel!!!
Hi David, the Yamahas, along with the AR2ax's, are two of the speakers which have given me the largest dose of the Kundalini Effect, when mated to the Sony 3130F, though I do hear it peep through various combinations I have tried. However, with a big idler behind various items of equipment, I hear all kinds of flavours of Beauty and Excitement, keep us posted as to the strange Tube Beastie you might get next.
