Great thread,
must be the most sincere outlet for AKers to just rant openly about what all of us can relate to through our journey for audio perfection.. Laughing out loud while going back though the pages . Beautiful thread with a lot of history to boot. Thank s all!
I want to declare an all-time winner (think Nobel, Pulitzer, Darwin, Oscars) even though its been over 30 years
since it burned me. And the only reason is that there is now a large-scale movement to revitalize the dang thing:
Garrard Zero-100C
snaps cantilevers off on arm liftoff at end of play. Lost so many ADC XLMs, M91EDs, and I see people buying these
200+ grams of effective mass vinyl recutting monsters - totally eliminating inner and outer groove distortion,
while cleaning everything - all in a single pass.
Wanna run one today?, buy a DJ cartridge that is known to track at over 5 grams, have a thick cantilever,
BUT put three thin beads of Gorilla Glue along the cantilever to BRACE it against 1000ft-lbs of twisting motion.
Here's to Garrard's LAST turntable, and to its wedgie apocalypse on ADC - forcing them to keep revising the XLM
until it, too, disappeared off the face of the earth by trying to fix snapping cantilevers...
What I found amusing at the time--I was in the Sony outlet and the salesman was trying to push me towards a 100w/ch non-ES receiver. "But it has 100 watts, the GX700ES only has 70." I don't think he had a clue as to decibels, and how little difference it actually was on paper. But the ES is a heavy unit--there is way more going on inside than in the typical Sony receivers. My other Sony doesn't have any of the processing circuitry, but it is still rather lifeless and bland in comparison.
I mentioned I had more than a few Sony disc players die on me. Yet the record store I frequented (Car City Records) had this ancient Sony ES CD player that was running almost nonstop the entire time I shopped there (aside from when they'd occasionally play vinyl). There was definitely something better about the Sony ES line, for the most part. At least in those earlier days.