JACQUES HIFI PAGES
TURNTABLES ARE NOT DEAD. THEY JUST SMELL FUNNY.
Turntables comeback is great news. I really missed all this machinery from the 19th century, good ol'LPs and endless speeches about stylus weight, hifi cartridges and discs cleaners. I have never been a good samaritan for vinyls...too lazy to clean them or take any care of them, and even if you do you will always end up with scratching noises. I have always wondered where those scratches came from. They seem to appear by themselves overnight. Generation spontanee. Anyway, vinyls was all we had in my times, and 90% of my CD were already present in my collection in vinyl form. Damned record companies...they knew that good music production was ending so they decide to have us buy all our records a second time , double price. Let's speak old french francs now : I bought David Bowie 'Alladin sane' one time when it came out for 40Frs. Then a second time when it was issued in CD for 100Frs. My vinyl badly needed retirement. Then a third time in its luxury remaster, mostly because first CD reissues of classic records had horrible mastering . A bargain at 15euros. At the end, I paid 50 actual euros in total for listening to the same old 'Cracked actor'. You can cry me a river now. Nowadays, when most new recording are bad music---when there's music at all : rap---, they want us to pay again for...'Abbey road' ??!!??!??
Well, let's calm down with this shot of great cartridges from my times ---I was born in 1960---. When I bought the beautiful Pro-Ject turntable on the top of this page, it was fitted with an Ortofon RED. Good Lord, they call that a phono cartridge ???--I am getting mad again--. A huge plastic snail shell with an itsy bitsy tiny cartridge from the DJ stuff---have they ears?---stuck inside and a metal plate screwed in it to add some weight, in order to appear serious. All of this motley assembly sounding like my first ceramic piezo cartridge from ITT. Well, to think again, my ITT may have sounded better. Another disapointment was the setting on the Pro-Ject : no ruler on the counterweight. They give you a cheap plastic 'scale' to weight your tonearm. Ok, but the counterweight does not turn like in all my old turntables, but 'slide' on the arm and then you have to secure it with an allen key ---which was included but WRONG size !--. So there you go back and forth , going from 1g to 2g in a pinch, and waiting for luck to make you stop at the exact weight. Eventually , I managed more or less to fit her my old M91ED from Shure. A good turntable now. Nothing, apart from its look, to rave about. And the motor, while cleverly apart from the table like in expensive stuff, is quite noisy and gets its current from a wallwart , like my cellphone.
My old Thorens was really another league. Making one with its original Grado cartridge, like an old couple. Great classic.
Or my DUAL 1019 , originally fitted with M44 from Shure. The one that I got with the CV40 amp. She weights a ton, its automatic mechanism is lunatic and the headshell locking system is always making bad contacts. But what a sound.
My trusty TECHNICS SL-1900 from a time when direct drive was the trend. These days aficionados only swear by belts. I don't really care just as long as there is an old SHURE cartridge....here a M75 with a new stylus. I bought this stylus from a Japan company called Jico and find it's perfect, just like the original shure when he was young. So I ordered their Super Analog stylus for my M91, which is supposed to be top class. If this is true, I really wonder why we should buy new cartridges.
It had to be a Philips here, even if it's branded SCHNEIDER . This turntable is so light you think it's made of balsa wood . All cheap plastic . Exactly the opposite of high-end supermodels who compete like sumo fighters way up the quintal. But it does sound good. Certainly thanks to its great Philips cartridge, which is really seriously built. The cheapest way to vinyl heaven .
RIAA preamps are quite a new game for me. In my time, all amps came with a phono input, usually very good. So we never cared about this element. For my main Yaqin amp, I rely on this Yaqin tube RIAA preamp mostly because it matches. I fitted it with my best preamp tubes I could not use in the amp : SIEMENS E83CC and AMPEREX 'Bugleboy' 12AU7. I don't know if it sounds any better now, but what a joy to think music is going through these legendary tubes. Until I try to make my own RIAA circuit....
MY PREAMP/BUFFER : MYKONOS AMPLIFIERS SPEAKERS CD PLAYERS DAC DRIVES / TRANSPORTS OSCILLOSCOPE TEST DRIVE TURNTABLES DCC PLAYERS