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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

We always talk about the great equipment we own or owned. What about the bad and the ugly?
Here are my choices and you have to have owned them! Provide links so we can see also.
My choices for terrible and ugly are The Transcriptors Vestigial Arm and the Win Labs Strain Gauge Cartridge.
https://www.google.com/search?q=transcriptors+vestigial+tonearm&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS869US869&sou...
https://www.google.com/search?q=win+labs+cartridge&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS869US869&source=lnms&...
The arm was a pitiful looking tinker toy which certainly did not engender pride in ownership, but worse the vertical effective mass was so low and warp wow so severe it was virtually unlistenable. I had it mounted on an LP 12.
The Win Labs was a poor tracker and was too bright in my system. I can't remember which arm I had at the time, may have been the Itoc. It was a cheesy plastic thing, glued together with adhesive oozing out of the seams. 
Both items only lasted a few months. The arm was a design failure. The cartridge needed a lot more development.
128x128mijostyn
elliottbnewcombjr
5,640 posts
 
I loved my Thorens TD124, (it with aforementioned SME 3009), could take it apart, clean/adjust, replaced the rubber suspension grommets that had hardened, made custom wood base

but, the bearing, incredibly machined, was highly sensitive to vertical vibration, a bad combination with my springy floors, I traded it for a Fisher 500C I seem to remember. Lots of switches and pots to clean on it.

I found this interesting

https://www.woodsongaudio.com/service/thorens-td124-main-spindle-bearing-rebuild

It was absolutely amazing to drop that heavy platter and bearing shaft into the bearing sleeve and see how long it took for the air to get out of the bearing to allow it to descend. 
antigrunge2
1,455 posts
 
For a while I had a real love hate relationship with a Graaf GM20.
while with a bit of nudging (adding autoformers to improve driving ability) it could sound wonderful and looked glorious, it equally was prone to heat a room all by itself and each time the tubes needed biasing had to be dismantled to get to the biasing points. In the end I decided it had to go.
roxy54's avatar
roxy54
8,089 posts
 
Not necessarily bad or ugly, but my biggest disappointments were a Phase Linear 2000 preamp , which looked pretty but sounded terrible and was an almost empty bow with a couple of pcb's, and deHavilland 845 monoblocks which just didn't sound good.  
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
There's two kinds of people in the world, Tuco 


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