Building high-end 'tables cheap at Home Despot II
Hi Jean, This is my first post here, I'm a bit more active over on Lenco Lovers but I noticed Mario mentioned my name so I thought I'd join in. First off I'd just like to say thanks for inspiring me to rediscover the world of Lenco. A Gl72 was the first "separate" deck I owned way back but I was then seduced by the belt is better dogma of the 70's. An ebay listing by a guy selling a Garrard 401 which stated he was keeping his Lenco got me curious and a google led me to this thread. The rest as they say is history. Anyway, down to business. I see we are both fans of the RS-A1 arm, a weird but wonderful contraption if ever there was one! I first heard it some years ago at a high end dealer not too many miles from where I live. Having recently bought one but not from that dealer he saw my posts on Lenco Lovers and emailed me with a few tips (they are not all bad) as he uses one himself. Firstly, they frequently use cartridges with threaded holes on the RS. Get the two lined up tight and screw the bolts in. I tried this and it worked fine. I suppose there is a chance that the two threads will be out of sync when you do this so maybe a tiny sliver of something compressible could be use between shell and cartridge if you can't get them up tight. The other thing he told me I sort of knew, and I dare say you do to. The rotating headshell has nothing to do with an attempt to align the stylus tangentially like a parallel tracking arm but everything to do with decoupling the headshell from the arm. Alignment can look absurd if you watch this arm traverse a record but it works wonderfully! Changing subjects, like many before me I have built fairly massive plinths using ply/mdf as per your recipe and been very happy with the results so I have no doubt that your even bigger, heavier plinths make for excellent vinyl replay. However, with a desire to make something less bulky and stimulated by various commercial but expensive manufacturers I have been trying out slate as a plinth material. I'm really quite excited with this material and have managed to make a small form 88 which to my ears sounds very fine indeed, so much so that I doubt if I will make another ply/mdf plinth. The plinth is about 44x40x25cm and weighs in at 45lbs or so. See Litle Stan I think it is a worthy alternative to the tried and trusted methods, so I suppose my question is have you thought about giving this material a go? Regards, Ian |
Hi Ian, yes, I am in fact waiting For a piece I can play with! For thiose wondering, I've been cut off from the internet out in the country for weeks now, but am moving back to town where I will once again regularly report on experiences and experiments. Just a quickie from here at the public library: I tried Reinderspeter's top-plate, and those looking to it to "control" the Mighty Lenco exhuberance, SLAM, bass, and excitement, look elsewhere! The bass is deeper, tighter, more detailed (!!!) and even more powerful! The PRaT is there in spades, elsewhere the race against a glass-reinforced original top-plate is close-run. To remind people, the original Lenco top-plate reinforced with glass-epoxy slugged it out with the SME 30 (famed for its powerful bass) where, in the bass, it was overall more powerful, tghter and more detailed, depending on the recording, to the point it was thought by some (not all) the Lenco was coloured. Well, the stronger steel top-plate makes the bass even more powerful and exciting. Full auditioning and comparisons has not yet been done. On the Garrard Front, I have to declare the Kokomo bearing mod from Germany a necessity, as it easily doubles the Garrard's sound quality all on its own (when the Garrard is Direct Coupled to a massive plinth). The clarity, speed, air, information-retrieval and bass all improve vastly. When I'm connected at the new downtown address, I'll be able to report in greater detail and depth on all these exciting developments! Have fin all, and keep the Idler Faith, the Great Idler-Wheel Revival is truly on!!! Vive la Idler Wheel, Vive la Lenco!!! Have fun all! |
Dear Jean, I am trying to read not between the lines but right on the lines you wrote. Are you saying that the PTP2 (or whatever) beats the glass-reinforced standard chassis, assuming similarly good Nantais plinths, or not? Oh, I now see that you say full auditioning has not been done. I've been waiting to have your results on this. One would think that a second major advantage of the PTP2 vs the standard chassis (besides its stiffness) is the vastly improved isolation from motor vibration. I've come to think that even when motor noise is inaudible on the speakers, reducing it further below the audible threshold (as I did by installing the replacement motor you kindly supplied) improves the treble and soundstaging very noticeably. |
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!! |
