SOTA Customer service

Good to hear. Checked your VS. Love the look of the Toolshed 300B. How does the SOTA compare with your digital?

Thanks !   It's a great sounding amp.  I am having  Matt from Toolshed build me a preamp also, should be done in a few months.   

  I have just returned to vinyl after a ten plus year hiatus.   The Sota came with an Origin Live and I paired it with a 2m Bronze.  Phono pre is a Sutherland KC Vibe mkII.  It sounds great .   

My digital setup is a LAB 12 DAC 1 Reference and an Aurender N200 .   I really like that DAC, it's totally non fatiguing and it's that rare component that I feel no need to upgrade.  I love how it sounds 

As far as analog VS digital I think my cartridge and phono pre are the limiting factor.   I am planning on upgrading the Sutherland to a 20/20 and a really nice MC cartridge.     I am thinking about the ZYX Bloom 3 ....    

As far as the Sota goes, the Escape is really great for the money.  It has the 1.5" platter and the Condor controller and motor .  A lot of turntable for the money and worth outfitting with a great cartridge. 

This is my experience with SOTA to date.

I bought a Sota vacuum table around 1989. After about 500 hours of use, the table rather suddenly started having the RPM drop by about 10% to 20% about 15 minutes after starting playing a record, and the speed would be unsteady from there. If I turned it off and waited, it would be OK again - until after I played it, then after a bit it would suddenly go bad again. I contacted SOTA, they said send the electronics to them. They returned that to me, said they had fixed the problem, and charged me $200. Within a month or two it started doing exactly the same thing again. All that money for that turntable, and I can hardly express what I thought about it at that point. I never played a record again for 30 years for various reasons, but beginning with not having a working turntable or money to buy a different one.

I recently bought another turntable, a Michell Audio Orbe SE. Definitely not a SOTA.

I have accumulated a lot of mono recordings over the last few months and have decided to look into getting the SOTA fixed up, buy another arm (I'm using the original I had on the orbe SE), and put a mono cartridge on it. I am going to see what kind of guarantee they can offer that it will not go bad again, and if they ever identified exactly what aspect of their engineered design was failing so miserably. I will see what they say. They have a long ways to go to make me feel good about their product and service again. With the advent of 30 years, I am willing to give them a chance to try. Things change a lot in 30 years.

@bibliojim Woot! A new story to follow!