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What is the fascination?

I have to ask what is the fascination with these older turntables?  I recently listened to an older SP 10 MKII with a Jelco and Older SME arm with Koetsu and Stanton cartridges.  The sound was very good I will admit but I cannot say it was better than the 1200G or even a 1200GR for that matter.  Heck even the Rega RP 8 is really an amazing sounding turntable for the money and they are brand new.   These tables are coming up on 40 plus years old.  One forum contributor said a turntable should not have any sound at all.  I agree and the newer tables get closer to that "no sound" than many of these colored (smooth,  warm) sounding turntables   I recently purchased a Pickering ESV 3000 MM cartridge that arrived in the mail yesterday and I had to ask myself, "what am I doing?"  So with that being said, why the fascination?  If one want to change the sound of the table, start with the cartridge, they all do sound different.  Nowadays the tables and arms are so good and engineered based on the earlier designs and bettered.  Also, when you buy say an older used arm, how do you know its been cared for?  Arms bearings can be screwed up pretty bad when one tries to tighten cartridges with the headshell attached to the tonearm or the tonearm mounted on the table and many people do not even know they are destroying their arms bearings so I mean you really have to know who you are getting the arm from and check the bearings etc.  There is a lot of risk with turntables, much more than with any components because of so many moving parts that do get old and break.  Why the fascination? 
tzh21y

Showing 2 responses by atmasphere

atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,615 posts
 
No, it was never the best. But when it first came out in the '60s, it was a whole lot better than much of the competition.
?? The Empire was better, the Lenco was better, Thorens, the Garrard 301, Dual, Miracord, even some of the higher end BSRs... The AR was terrible. We hated seeing them come in the shop. The trick to making them work was a bit of talcum powder on the belt, since the motor was so underpowered. The plastic headshell often had fit problems going into the arm tube- the plastic was often deformed. The suspension couldn't manage a proper platter pad, so it had a foam pad that was loaded with static electricity. The platter and bearing were its main strength and it had good looks, which is what sold it.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,615 posts
 
Years ago one of my employees picked up an Empire 208 at a garage sale, and got it sounding good enough that for fun, I sought one of my own, which I found for $35.00 (good luck trying to do that now!).

I threw out the arm and installed my SME 5 on it-  it then sounded better than my SOTA Cosmos. But when I turned up the volume, the SOTA held together and the Empire didn't. So I damped the plinth and it sounded much better, even at volume, so the Cosmos went on the chopping block. After that I damped the platter, and ultimately had a plinth machined out of solid aluminum (the original is cast and no more than 14" thick), taking out the minimum amount of material to mount the original parts. I found a source for belts, the motor mounts, damped the platter and its been hard to beat! By this time the machine had a Triplanar installed. Others wanted one too, so I made a limited run of them. The new plinth is built with all the same lines as the original which IMO has some pretty classic lines, although our version is anodized rather than varnished. 
I've seen it take on serious high end machines and come out on top- Empire had a lot of things right with the original, but they didn't do too well with vibration control, which we fixed.

But then the new Technics SL1200G came along and that was a better machine yet. So I think the Atma-Sphere 208 is history at this point...
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