Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?


I have just acquired a 32 year old JVC/Victor TT-101 DD turntable after having its lesser brother, the TT-81 for the last year.
TT-101
This is one of the great DD designs made at a time when the giant Japanese electronics companies like Technics, Denon, JVC/Victor and Pioneer could pour millions of dollars into 'flagship' models to 'enhance' their lower range models which often sold in the millions.
Because of their complexity however.......if they malfunction.....parts are 'unobtanium'....and they often cannot be repaired.
128x128halcro

IMO, it is not in the design architecture, it is in the build. The two motors are fundamentally the same design but the MK3 has been fed growth steroids.

Richard what a good analogy. I thought that was what audiophiles want. The bigger the better.
Hiho, I do agree with you; no plinth can totally take away the coloration of the Mk2, but a good plinth can take away other colorations and leave one with only that and less of the other. Which is why I think the gray-ness was so evident in my pretty darn good slate plinth. Is it not interesting that when the adjective "gray" (or "grey") is used to describe this coloration, all or most of us who have owned or do own the Mk2 know exactly what the writer is describing? Which is to say that there are subjective judgements with objective truth of a sort. To think that the Krebs mods on the Mk2 are less expensive than the mods to the Mk3, around the cost of a medium price cartridge or vintage Japanese tonearm, makes it indispensible to the Mk2, I think.
Lew.
Thought that you may find this amusing. Here on the perimeter of the world we spell gary, grey (Gray even comes up with an auto correct spelling error as I type this)

>>>>>>>>Gray vs. grey

Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed.

Both spellings, which have origins in the Old English grǽg, have existed hundreds of years.1 Grey gained ascendancy in all varieties of English in the early 18th century, but its dominance as the preferred form was checked when American writers adopted gray about a century later. As the Ngram below shows, this change in American English came around 1825. Since then, both forms have remained fairly common throughout the English-speaking world, but the favoring of gray in the U.S. and grey everywhere else has remained consistent.

Some people make their own distinctions between gray and grey. You can find some interesting examples in the comments below. There is nothing wrong with these preferences, but they are not borne out in broader usage. For most people, gray and grey are simply different spellings of the same word.

Both spellings are used for the participles, grayed/greyed and graying/greying, as well as for most of the words and phrases involving gray/grey. For instance, grey area/gray area, referring to an area having characteristics of two extremes, is commonly spelled both ways. So is graybeard/greybeard, referring to an older man with a beard, and gray squirrel/grey squirrel (which refer to closely related types of squirrels on opposite sides of the Atlantic). There are at least a couple of exceptions, though: greyhound, for the breed of dog, always has an e, while grayling, which refers to several types of fish, always has an a.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On the subject of "are we living dangerously", I would like to report to anyone who followed my travail with the TT101 on the "other" thread, where it was OT, that after my TT101 ran reliably for more than a week on our kitchen counter, I decided to spare my wife the sight of it and brought it down to my basement system, where I hope to use it. I plugged it in and turned on the Power, due to my (our?) conviction that keeping it powered on was advisable. I left it alone for about a week, because I was preoccupied with other issues. At that point, I tested the function again, ever the paranoid. Now the TT101 was malfunctioning again exactly as it had been doing previously: It starts up and runs for about 90 seconds. While running it displays speed errors, typically 33.32 or 33.34. Then it shuts itself down with no braking and the platter coasts to a stop. At this point, I have spent several hundred dollars with a machinist making alu parts to beef up the QL10 plinth, based on my previous confidence that the TT101 had healed itself. Out of curiosity, I moved the TT101 back up to our kitchen counter. In that locale, it malfunctioned for a while, just as it had done in the basement. However, within about a half hour, it had "healed" itself again, and now it is working perfectly, every time, on the kitchen counter. I am absolutely sure this problem is due to a poor electrical contact somewhere in the circuit, because the problem is associated with moving the unit around. I do not think this has anything to do with my basement or witchcraft. My plan is to take the top panel off and re-solder every contact on every switch. I am also concerned about the many multi-prong plugs that connect the various circuit boards. I don't know how to disassemble them in order to access the soldered joints within, but any one of them could be a culprit.

Thus I declare that the TT101 is the most "dangerous" vintage Japanese direct-drive tt of them all. I've never had any problems with any of the 5 or 6 others that I have owned that did not respond to the simple expedient of replacing the electrolytic capacitors.