Hello everybody,
Just discovered the SL-110 and SL-1100 owners club, so I’m new to this forum. I’d like to share my experience with this turntable.
I have had a Technics SL-110 since 1986, when my favorite hifi-shop (at that time) had a second-hand one for sale, equipped with an SME 3009 III arm. I was especially keen on the arm because of a couple of reasons:
- I had read a lot of praise in German hifi-magazines regarding the SME 3009 III
- It had a plethora of adjustments to optimize performance (or to mess around, which I liked)
- It looked completely different from other tonearms, not quite unlike the turret and gun of a tank
- I had a Technics SL1600 Mk2 with a Dynavector Karat 23RS cartridge which I felt didn’t perform at the level it was supposed to (= what the German hifi-magazines wrote about the cartridge).
One of the salesmen from the shop told me he had owned an SL-110 himself (I don’t remember with which arm). He had replaced the armboard with a custom made, solid brass one and had extensively damped the chassis and the platter with Dynamat-like stuff. He had replaced the SL-110 with a Micro Seiki BL91 (IIRC), which in hindsight was wasted money because the Micro Seiki performed at the same level as his modified Technics. So I confidently bought the SL110 complete with arm, strobe light and dustcover.
Once home and with everything up and running the SL-110/SME 3009 III/Karat 23RS indeed improved on the sound of the SL1600 Mk2/Karat 23RS by quite some margin, which I attributed mainly to the (supposedly better) SME arm. There was one problem however: hum from the mains transformer entered the cartridge, so I started modifying the SL-110 like the salesman had done. I damped the entire chassis, the platter and the original wooden armboard with Dynamat-like stuff and took the mains voltage selector and transformer out of the chassis to put it into a separate box. Since then a thick multicore cable connects the SL-110 with its mains section. I also removed the L-formed piece of metal with the 4 cinch connectors and replaced the original rubber mat with a Record Interface Mat (a sort of copy of the Goldmund Relief Mat). And yes, the sound got even better: a blacker background, more detail and more control. The music also sounded more relaxed than before.
Some 5 years ago I began experimenting with other arms, which is very easy to do because of the simple armboard. A Rega RB250 and Origin Live Illustrious Mk2 were mounted on an MDF armboard and finally came a Dynavector DV505 on a solid wengé armboard. And the sound got better again than with the SME arm.
In an effort to rank my SL-110/DV505 setup I compared it with two other turntables (both also in my possession):
- a Pink Triangle PT Export with SME IV arm
- a PTP4-Lenco L75 with the Dynavector DV505 arm taken from the SL-110
Quite to my surprise (since these turntables have rather opposing designs), the PT Export/SME IV combo sounds very much like my SL-110/DV505 setup! The PTP4-Lenco L75/DV505 combo on the other hand sounds a little different, with a tauter and leaner bass region which more resembles the sound of my CD player. While some will regard this as a good thing, others might find it bad.
I have attached pictures of two different setups of my SL-110. Hope you like them.