On to the turntables….. sharing my history.
I think a lot of us appreciate photos of gear so I’m providing those.
My dad was something of an audiophile, Stereo mag reader etc, and it was either late 70s or early 80s that he brought home big flagship KEF 105.2 speakers, with Carver amplification - a Carver cube amp and the famous “sonic holography” C-4000 preamp. And a
Technics SL-1200 series turntable. I’m not sure precisely the model but one of these guys:
When I moved into my current house in the 90s, I inherited that turntable. Since I had some of my old records, still kicking around I throw that turntable into my system sometimes and listen to records for a bit of a nostalgia trip.
Later my father-in-law, a classical music enthusiast, and somewhat audiophile, gave me his turntable because he had long ago switched to CDs.
It was a beautiful
MICRO SEIKI DD-40 Turntable - w Ortofon Cartridge, MA-505 Tonearm:
I had that for a number of years and I noticed that vinyl was sounding better on my system, even my older records. Some of that could simply be due to how old the Technics cartridge had been I don’t know. But in either case I started to enjoy the actual sound of my vinyl records, which could sound really luscious. (especially if they weren’t too noisy).
That combined with all the production of new vinyl, starting with my obsession of movie, soundtracks and buying many gorgeously designed soundtracks on vinyl, started me back buying new records again.
And of course, the more I bought the more serious I got and, being my audiophile self, I thought it would it be worth to upgrade my vinyl front end.
I ended up purchasing used, as much reduced price, a German made high mass turntable:
A
Transrotor Fat Bob S Turntable which uses a “ magnetic drive bearing.” Since some people here like technical details, I had ChatGPT (sorry) describe it:
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It’s a magnetically coupled bearing + inverted hydrodynamic (oil-fed) support bearing. In practice that means: the platter/sub-platter is supported by a lubricated bearing shaft (hydrodynamic oil), and the actual platter is driven not by a physical belt directly acting on it, but via magnetic coupling.
The magnetic coupling creates a physical decoupling between motor drive and platter — the drive belt (or motor) spins a sub-platter / sub-assembly, and that sub-assembly magnetically “drags” the main platter. Because there’s no rigid mechanical link, this reduces transmission of motor noise or vibrations into the platter, resulting in smoother rotation, minimal friction, reduced resonance and improved speed stability.
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Integrating a magnetic bearing seems to be pretty common now in the high end turntable sphere (that is at least of the type that make their appearance at audio shows and audio mags). But I believe previous turntables had also done something similar (?)
It came with a
12 inch Acoustic Solid Arm and a Benz Micro Ebony L cartridge:
The original motor controller was the cylinder at the bottom of the picture to the right with the notch.
The whole top was a big dial for turning on the turntable and choosing the speed. It had a very wonderful hand feel, very smooth with a nice clunk for each position.
I can’t speak to the success of any of their particular technical claims of the turntable/arm/cartridge but I was blown away by the results.
Vinyl records played quieter than ever in terms of background noise, and the level of clarity and separation and detail seemed to improve distinctly, putting clean records more in competition to what I was hearing from my digital front end.
Which, of course only spread more record buying! And boy did I spend a lot of money on records! Especially when I got into the genre of Library Music which by nature are all rare records (and mostly not available on digital, except now for the KPM library).
Later on I got a good deal on Transrotor’s top level motor controller. A very big beast with a satisfyingly large, silky knob feel:
Also shown in the above photo is my JE Audio phono stage. I really like it because it has every feature in setting easily visible and accessible on the front panel. (the description of some phono stages, where you have to take the unit out and move little switches on the bottom, or even in some cases, literally take off a panel and reroute jumpers, makes my blood chill).
Finally, in preparation for receiving that big heavy turntable, I wanted to deal with my puny old hollow tubed Lovan equipment rack on which would be sitting. The floor beneath that rack is wood and quite springy and transmits foot fall very easily. When my son who is quite big walks by, it would often skip records.
So I went down the rabbit hole of building a turntable isolation platform. It’s sort of a compilation of some of the things I tried and leftovers. It’s a solid butcher block - smoked maple - and that put your block is sitting upon another sort of constrained layer sandwich of MDF with steel in the middle. And then all that is sitting on four Townshend Audio Seismic Pods (Spring based):
I have doubts this heroic isolation base improves the sound quality of the turntable. But it certainly does stop any heavy footsteps from skipping records. Especially with the spring pods, I can stamp the ground around the equipment rack and feel virtually nothing getting through to the turntable. It also helps with the fact we have a big air-conditioning unit on the other side of the wall outside, and when it turns on in the summer, it sends rumbling through the walls and floor, and none of that gets through to the turntable with this is isolation base.
Back to the rest of the gang…
