Phew, I see I've missed a lot of action by being cut off from the internet, including reviews of exciting new analog products!! Forced to use free internet for 15-minute pops once a week when I went to town led to such great typos as "Have fin", which is entirely appropriate considering the Dolphin pump Mike recommends for the Terminator tonearm :-).
Speaking of which, reminds me of early days in the original thread when I believe it was Reinderspeter who was using his DIY version of the Ladegaard tonearm on his first Lenco. I see I have a lot of catching up to do with respect to reviews and buzzes on products on Da 'Net after my long isolation in the country. Lots of surfing to do to catch up!! The Terminator sounds really exciting Mike! I was speaking with an old buddy I bumped into in town last week who had me build him a MG-1-adapted Lenco, the MG-1 being another low-priced air-bearing tonearm, as he has fallen completely under the spell of his MG-1 after years, the Lenco/MG-1 being one of the few pieces to survive an across-the board clearing after he had decided to sell everything off (including recent components from Audio Research, Bryston, Aesthetix, etc.) and start over from scratch. Others, on the other hand, find they can't live with the air-hiss noise, which is barely audible. Is it audible with the Terminator Mike? Not that this bothers me, we all have different things we can tolerate. I'll soon be building my long-threatened Lenco-Noll, using the Maplenoll tonearm on the Reinderspeter top-plate Lenco. Maybe I should re-think this and go for the Terminator. Having lived with the Maplenoll for years which was excellent in both audiophile and musical terms, I do have a thing for air-bearing parallel-tracking tonearms.
Speaking of the Reinderspeter top-plate Lew, yes, it seems to be an across-the-board improvement over the "regular" Lenco, but with losses of convenience (you have to remove the platter and manually slide the idler-wheel arm to adjust or change speeds), and with the clearance between the platter and the top-plate itself so small that even paint thickness can cause rubbing/scraping problems. So assemble first and then see how much paint you can use, as there are variations in both main bearing height, and in platter height/thickness, the latter likely due to variations in the brass insert to seat the platter on the main bearing. I had to go through my collection of platters and main bearings to find a match which cleared the professionally recoated top-plate. All that said, again on a rather brief comparison (there will be longer ones to come as I set up in the new abode/soundroom), the Reinderspeter top-plate did outperform the "regular" Lenco on all counts, across the frequency range, including motor noise. And again that said, I will always keep a "regular" massive glass-reinforced Direct Coupled Giant Lenco on hand for its convenience and ease of use, and because, let's face it: if it can square off against $50K record players (and above) then it's good enough for me! And improvements in the bass by the Reinderspeter top-plate aside, Mike's experience with the Terminator tonearm shows that improvements in the bass can be achieved by other means (if necessary: the Lenco bass was definitely more powerful than that from the SME 30, for instance, and every other 'table it has been pitted against so far, colouration questions aside), so the regular Giant Direct Coupled Lenco can be further improved by all kinds of means, and is already unbelievably (literally) good.
Speaking of which (again), my experience with the superb Kokomo bearing mod for the Garrards, which uses a "soft" ceramic ball bearing, suggests that such a creature might improve the Lenco main bearing, I'll have to try the Lenco bearing mod at some point with a softer ceramic bearing.
Now I'm setting up in a new place, I've tripped over and acquired lots of new equipment for the new sound room! First off: I walked into a used audio shop just as a pair of very unlikely speakers I would never have considered otherwise were playing, and I was entranced: a pair of Technics SB-4 speakers, being "Linear Phase Honeycomb Disc Speaker Systems", having flat diaphragms made of a very light and stiff metal honeycomb material. It is the smallest of a series of three-way speakers (the others being the SB-6 and SB-8), and is that mythical beast: a dynamic driver speaker which actually does sound like an electrostatic, having no speaker-box/resonant sound, and being extremely detailed with enormous clarity, speed and a chameleon-like ability to sound exactly like the driving electronics. To drive them I bought both a C-J PV-7, which simply does the best palpability/3D/air-resonance retrieval I have ever heard from any preamp (and so which makes live recordings sound better than I have ever heard them), and a C-J PV-8, which is the big and warm-sounding PV-7's polar opposite, not sounding like the pure tube preamp it is (it was designed to compete with the Audio Research SP-9, which at the time set the benchmark for detail and "neutrality" in reasonably-priced preamps). Of course I write of all these things with respect to each preamp's phono stage, but used as a complete preamp. Finally, to go along with all these things I heard and bought a Mitsubishi amp, the DA-A10DC, a 100-watt dual-mono design from way back, and one of the best transistor amps I've heard. Has no reputation, can be had cheap. Ultra-detailed, powerful, clean-sounding with no nasties. The speakers verge on the bright, but with no screechy nasties, which is why I favour the PV-7 for now. Of course, I'll soon be trying the Leak amp with them which though only 12 watts will do, as the Technics speakers are also sensitive and easy to drive. Oh, and I was using the AKG P8ES MM on a Rega RB-300 the whole time, and I was not missing my higher-end tonearms or cartridges at all, I LOVE the P8ES, which is very detailed, warm, magical and retrieves air and resonances itself like a Grado, and am again amazed a how good the good ol' Rega tonearms are.
Lots more too, but that's enough for now, I'll report back as I settle into the new sound-room and catch up on some reading. Have fun all!!
