Audiomeca Mephisto IIx or BAT VK-D5SE

Seems that Mephito II is no longer servicable. This is the message I got from AudiomecaŁ

"Dear Sir,

We do not recommend to buy this unit. Mephisto II production is over for too long. Almost 10 years already. Many spare parts are out of stock and not available from suppliers anymore. Besides, the digital world runs very fast and this unit becomes to be out of date.
Feel free to be back to us if you need to.
Good luck,"

and:

"Dear Sir,

The problem with the digital world is that it runs too fast and spare parts get quickly out of stock. We have no more laser head nor mechanism. In addition this production is over for a good 8 years !
You can try from Dönberg in Ireland but you hardly could replace the head yourself as a complete realignment of the mechanism must be done in the same time. Note also that a head can die, for sure, but our experience says that most of the time the cause is not the head. Instead a servo failure or a shift of the mechanism adjustments."

I have owned my Audiomeca Mephisto II.X for almost 4 years now, my unit was on only 4 months old when I got it. So far I have never had any problems with it. Sound is superb, most analogue sounding player I have ever heard and I have heard things I never knew were even on the disk. My son also has the same model but his unit is a bit older, he had one issue with it skipping a while back, we contacted Pierre in France and he responded immediately and told us a few things to try. Unfortunately none worked and we ended up taking his unit into Echo Audio here in Portland where their master tech, said not problem we can fix it. And it wasn't, they fixed the problem and his unit is once again trouble free, that was over a year ago. So you can get them fixed should they break but you need to know where to look. So if you want superb sound I would try to find one in great shape. I have heard the BAT and it too is good but the Audiomeca really give you an emotional attachment. The other player I use is a Lector 7T, which is very close to the Audiomeca and after rolling some nos tubes, its one great player.

Good Luck

Unless things have changed from a couple years ago, getting customer support/sevice for the Mephsisto will not be possible. They had no distributor or dealer presence in the U.S. at that time. I think you'll be stuck if anything goes wrong with a Mephisto.