Thorens/SME similar appearance to your 3 options ebay, search for: Vintage Thorens TD520 3012-R Turntable With Power Adapter Operation Confirmed 2 out of 3, 2. removable headshell, the renowned SME 3012 arm (I loved my 3009 on Thorens TD124) 3. dustcover drilled or undrilled armboards readily available.
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As far as Vintage, I will be selling my Roksan Xerxes 1989 with Artemiz tone arm and a black Corus cartridge soon. I loved the TT but it is a delicate TT for me ,so not too patient in handling best left to someone who’s knowledgeable with vintage gear. That is the reason I m looking to buy a recent good turntable. |
@elliottbnewcombjr I hate to pop your bubble, but one great tonearm is way better than two cheap ones. Dust covers should be isolated and hinged so they can be used during play. A good thick acrylic dust cover can attenuate sound up to 10 dB at some frequencies further isolating the cartridge from sound. Removable head shells are a terrible thing to do to a cartridge and it's meager signal. Every contact degrades the signal just a little. The right way to wire a tonearm is a single cable cartridge clips to RCAs or XLRs at the phono stage end. The Schroder CB is an example of such an arm. The Thorens TD 1600 is a turntable with an isolated dust cover done the right way. The dust cover is mounted to the plinth not the chassis carrying the tonearm and platter. @vicdior Of the three turntables you have chosen the MoFi MasterDeck is the best as long as you place it on an isolation platform with a hinged dustcover. I suggest you look at the Thorens TD1600. It has a great dust cover, it is properly suspended and isolated and it has a fine tonearm. Turntables are vibration measuring devices and they do not care where the vibration is coming from. There is always a large amount of vibration in the environment at low frequencies. I call this environmental rumble which you can easily see if you have a turntable that is not properly isolated. Place the stylus down on a stationary record, turn the volume all the way up and watch the woofer or subwoofer. It should remain absolutely stationary, any movement is a problem. The only way to isolate a turntable from environmental rumble is to suspend the chassis that carries the tonearm and platter. The suspension should have a resonance frequency below 3 Hz. The best value in a mid priced turntable is the Thorens TD 1600. It has a fine suspension, an isolated dust cover that should be used during play and a fine tonearm. Next up would be a SOTA Sapphire with a Kuzma 4 Point 9. The Wand tonearm is a terrible design. It is a unipivot arm, the worst bearing configuration. It is being used because it is cheap. The Wand arm tube is a little pipe organ. Again, this is a simple cheap way of doing an arm wand. It is also ugly as h-ll. The turntable also suffers from some bad design choices. The oversized platter keeps you from using a 9" tonearm. 9" is the optimum length for a tonearm. Longer arms have higher moments of inertia and higher effective masses. Longer arm wands are not as stiff as shorter ones. Tracking angle error is a little higher, but the benefits outweigh this resulting in a better tracking and sounding tonearm. Longer arms are made because lay instinct demands them and manufacturers have to sell product. |
