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Vintage Japanese Turntables


My LPs have been in storage for many years, but I am thinking about getting them out of storage, buying one of the direct drive turntables I loved in my youth, and using a still new and in the box SME III tonearm I have in my collection.

A couple of questions for the analog experts, please

1) If I find a turntable without an SME armboard, would it be difficult or expensive to buy an SME armboard, or to otherwise adapt say, a Grace armboard for my SME arm? Or adapt the turntable?

2) I have found the Denon 103 debate interesting because I remember this as a cult cartridge which I thought might work well with this arm?

3) Any other concerns for vintage Japanese direct drive turntables?

I understand my choices might be largely sentimental here and easily outpeformed by other things - but for this application, I just want good to very good sound and vintage cool, more than state of the art performance.

Thank you.
cwlondon
Post removed 
thewizard
60 posts
 
Kenwood KD-500
cwlondon OP
1,210 posts
 
Viridian, thank you.

Wizard, yes, an excellent candidate which is on my short list and the turntable I loved as a kid.

Also like the huge Denons with the illuminated switches, so wondering if I could rip out the factory tonearm which also relates to my armboard question....
t_bone
1,182 posts
 
Hi CW, I don't know what your budget is, and what 'vintage cool' is for you. Offhand, fitting the category of tables which would accept the SMEIII, I like the high-design look of the PD-310, and stretching higher, the PD-444 and PD-555, and of course the "flying-saucer-in-a-plinth" method of buying a motor and plinthing it your way (Denon (go for the numbers above 5000 or the DP80 or DP75), JVC TT-71/TT-81, Sony TTS-6000 and TTS-8000, etc). I am sure there are more. For me, if I really wanted to use the SMEIII, my first thought would be a TTS-8000 in one of the original black lacquer plinths they sold, maybe the one which came with the 'rack handles'. Either that or a Micro Seiki, but those tend to get on in price (though if you want to spend the money, they are excellent. The belt-drive 1500 series are great tables, and armboards for SME are easily found or made; or the 'one-box' tables with model numbers ending in 91 or higher (91, 101, 111, 555, 777) are all excellent and allow interchangeable arm bases which accept SME-mount arms).

Personally, I'm partial to some of the tech-y looking stuff like the PX-2 you once had, and similar automatic tables, but they usually come with their own arms and I have never tried taking the original arms off. For further source material, you might try The Vintage Knob.

As to concerns about both armboards and tables, Viridian has it nailed. I would add the caveat that if the servo defeat switch is engaged, it may work, but some models had a tendency to stray a bit far before coming back and sound bad doing so. The models I distinctly remember having the strip were the above-mentioned Denons and Sonys. I am sure there were others which used the technology from Sony.
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