What's all the fuss about late 70s and earl 80s run of the mill midfi turntables?
My first table was a Garrard SL95-B. It was really nothing to sing about and you had to pay extra for the plastic base. I graduated from that to a Philips GA 212. Thank God it was located on a concrete slab floor. Still nothing special. Then on to a Sony 2251 LA with an SME 2009 tonearm. This was a real upgrade with an Ortofon MC20 cartridge and transformer. I thought I was doing that thing in tall cotton. Then I met Russ Goddard at The Audible Difference in Palo Alto. He told me to bring my setup to his store and we would do a little A-B comparison. After listening for only a minute or two it was obvious My Sony was not any way near a Linn LP 12 of that time. Anyway the point is most of the common tables from people like Garrard, Dual, Marantz, were just imposters to the real thing. I hold no nostalgic emotion to those tables. I was foolish enough to sell my Linn setup when the writing was on the wall around 1999 regarding vinyl. Big mistake!! I sold all my vinyl, my table with an Ittock arm arm and audio technica OC-9 shibata. A SOTA MC Head Amp designed by John Curl (a collectors item today) for $1000.00. Lock me up. I had every cartridge of the day, Koetsu, Supex, GAS, Fidelity Research. My 2 year old son tore the stylus off my Sleeping Beauty Shibata accindently.
Back then all I had was a discwasher brush and a Zerostat. My TT was was a B&O Beogram 1900 with their best cartridge. I did try several of the record protection systems as well. I cleaned every record every time I played them. But yeah, most of the albums I bought, had clicks and pops right outta the sleeve. And what’s wrong with using records as lazy susans? Ya have to put the Guac and chips somewhere 😁 |
@curiousjim I never found the Zerostat worked well on those fortunately few LPs that got static. But a few times it was so bad a small crack could be heard when the edge of the disc was earthed. I bought a Nitty Gritty years ago and still have it. It cleans the few discs I need to clean very well. But I have never had the problems you cite with new records. Yes some had pressing faults you could see and I sent them back. What kind of cartridges and arms have you used? I did find when I changed to MC years ago from Shure V2 and V3 that the surface noise diminished a lot. That was because tracking at 2.5g is a lot more secure and cut through a lot of the crap compared with floating around at 0.95g which was Shure's boast when the idea was to reduce tracking weight as low as possible. I recall Beograms had light tracking force. A silly idea - none of my records has ever worn out - except my original Blonde on Blonde that I played incessantly in 1966 and beyond on my father's Garrard with a flip-over cart, massive 'needle' and a spring applied tracking force that must have been at least 3-4g. I've got lots of other BonBs now, but that was an original mono bought on the first day, hard to find now. |
The ’Vinyl Revival’ has created a market for a new segment of buyers who never grew up with a turntable. They want a turntable but they have no experience. Meanwhile, because of decades of vinyl sales there are literally thousands of turntables for sale worldwide. To someone who knows zip about turntables: A turntable is a turntable is a turntable. They all play records, don’t they? Sellers gleefully get to sell turntables that no experienced Vinylista would touch with a barge pole. New and Used. |
My mother in law just turned 92 and is doing pretty well but wants to clear out her house . I took the Gerrard that the 6 kids played in seventies and not since. The mat and belt had rotted out and I replaced them. It turns out the cart and tonearm were manufactured as a unit and I left than in place after checking the alignment with the owner of a local record store. I plugged it into the same AVR that my Technics 1500 resides in, (AVR has a phono input with grounding), and even my determinedly non Audiophile wife could easily perceive the difference . It played, no audible distortion or hum, but just sounded grey opaque and much noisier. |
