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vintage turntables?

i dont know, but vintage technics, jvc, and pioneer are the only decks ive had experience with, but they have a special appeal to me. it seems to me that theres all these super fancy turntables out there, and im sure they sound really great, but things like funk firm, the pro-ject rpm aren't the same to me. they're not what i picture a turntable to be. anyone else out there feel the same way? i think what it comes down to is the look. maybe i'm just crazy, i dont know. haha
128x128chuckelator
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,753 posts
 
Weseixas, I suppose that depends on who to talk to. I had an SL1100, the very first direct-drive machine, and when the SP-10 came out, I wanted one a lot but could not afford it.

Maybe three years later (1982??) a friend of mine bought an SP-10 and it was immediately apparent that this was a great machine, and as I recall by that time it was widely viewed as one of the top tables at that time, although it did not have as much cache because it was not American-made.
weseixas
519 posts
 
The top Japanese table of that era IMO was Micro Seiki, i was not aware of the SP-10 being highly rated. Not unusual for the time i guess, before internet a lot was determined by the mags and localized knowledge..

Word up did not fly around as it does today..... :)

Regards,
macrojack
1,303 posts
 
The war of words between Michael of SOTA and Ivor of Linn dominated the turntable scene in the press in the early 80s and there was a general belief that Japanese product of that period was just dressed up mid-fi. In fact, the SP-10 MK II was packaged with the obsidian plinth and dustcover and an EPA-100 tonearm and marketed as the SL-1000 MK II simply because so many audiophiles were buying them for home use.
lewm
12,849 posts
 
I'm not so sure. Harry Pearson went ape over either the original SP10 or the SP10 Mk 2 (I think it was the original version), and that gave the product a whole lot of cache in the US. You might say that it was the first Japanese product to be so lionized, but there may have been others. The Micro Seiki products, on the other hand, were relatively unknown to me, living on the East coast US, and I was just as much of an audio nut then (in the 1970s) as now.
macrojack
1,303 posts
 
Lew - My memory is not to be trusted absolutely but I remember some things pretty well. I recall the EPA-100 and The Arm as being the TAS darlings of the day. It's quite possible that the SP-10 was as well. However, in those days the Goldmund tables reigned supreme and a variety of belts got the reviewers in a lather. Oracle, VPI, SOTA and Linn were the headliners as I recall.
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