Thorens TD 146

I bought a TD146 in, I believe, 1984 and used it for about 25 years. The TP-11 MkII tonearm was a bit different than I was used to seeing on Thorens tables. Instead of a removable headshell, the tonearm on the 146 had a removable wand (TP-63) with integrated headshell and the anti-skating was adjusted by moving a string-suspended weight, instead of a knob-selected setting.

The 146 had an auto-lift and shut-off mechanism which utilized an optical sensor that sensed the faster arm movement in the lead-out groove. This generally worked well unless the record had been stamped off-center. I had two LP's and quite a few of the large-hole 45 RPM singles that were stamped enough off-center that the arm would lift before the last song was finished.

It's likely that there was an adjustment that could have corrected this but it occurred so seldom that I lived with it. 

The tonearm on the TD-146 is actually listed in the manual as a TP-11 MkIII instead of MkII as I stated earlier and the effective mass is listed as 7.5g.

After doing a little more research on the TD-146, I discovered that there were actually six different versions of that turntable. Mine was the first version and it apparently had the TP-11 MkII. Some versions of the table had the MkIII arm which was 2mm longer. Both had an effective mass of 7.5g.

Back in the day, I thought that the black wand was carbon fiber, but a sales brochure for the TD-166 MkII with TP-11 MkIII arm states that it is a coating that utilizes "split-wave" technology to eliminate resonances.

So, I'm assuming that it is a coating over whatever alloy they used for the tonearm and not plastic

Check out the analog dept dot com. That's where I saw the sales brochure and tonearm data.