'Fraid i have to dive in here and offer my opinion that they were a complete and utter load of rubbish!
My father was an audiophile who lived through the years of Garrard versus BSR here in the UK in the 1960's and 1970's and he said it became fairly simple after a short while - if your cheap turntable/record player/radiogram was any good, it had a Garrard deck, if it wasn't it had a BSR!
From my own experiences i have found that where Garrard used metal for the moving parts of their changers and decks, BSR used nylon and these wear out much more quickly, break teeth and just generally fall apart! IMHO, the only models they did that are of any merit in terms of audio quality were the 710 and 810 and they can sound quite respectable but they are so hideously complicated that they are an utter pig to set up and get operating correctly - ultimately whether you consider the end result to be worth it is a matter of personal opinion!
Personally i would give any BSR decks a wide berth - you can do much better for even the cheap amount of money that one will command.
As an interesting aside, BSR also made some of my favourite decks at their factory near Birmingham in the UK - namely the ADC Accutrac 4000 and +6 models (this may go some way to explaining their reliability issues!!
) and also appear to have done their own versions called the BSR Accuglide series. I know of the existence of the XR50 and XR60 (XR 60 was basically the same as the Accutrac +6 and the XR50 had the same spindle mechanism but no track selection facility), but any further info would be appreciated! :thmbsp:
The mechanisms of the Accutracs also formed the basis of BSR's linear tracking XL1200 as mentioned by Kmik51 above.
As a final thought, if anyone would be interesting in reading a history of BSR, there is a book available called "Just for the record - a history of BSR" which i found quite an interesting read.
