Received the tonearm earlier this week. Working on the mount to the RP10 plinth now. Things I’ve learned so far: The RP10’s top brace is magnesium, while the new P10 uses ceramic. Whatever Rega says about stiffness may be correct, but I expect it was the tarnishing of the top brace that led them to change to ceramic. It took a while to clean that up and get a nice polish. Rega’s 3 point mount serves an important purpose, in that it keeps the tonearm mount fixed in one place. Origin Live’s tonearm doesn’t have this mounting feature. It just slips through the mounting hole and has a washer and large nut below, but there is nothing to keep the base of the arm from moving. This presents a problem because the tonearm cabling is thicker, bulkier, and less flexible than Rega’s and it’s too big and stiff to fit in Rega’s cable clamp beneath the plinth. Therefore, when the cables move so does the arm base. I need to find a way to keep the tonearm cables from moving, perhaps use a cable clamp on the component stand.
The legs on the Rega plinth are not long enough to allow an easy bend in the tonearm cables as they exit the bottom of the plinth. I didn’t anticipate the leg length problem, but that should be fairly easy to resolve. The dust cover on Rega’s extended plinth surround is a few inches too short and will not clear the new tonearm, but that I did anticipate and expect to order a taller aftermarket dustcover. I’ve been wanting to display the skeletal structure anyway, but it would have been nice to put it off a bit longer.
More later.