technics

Turntables II

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Ran into a SL1210MK2 for about the same price as a new Super OEM on a Dutch second hand market place so went for that. And it was only a 30km drive. It’s quite a battered specimen but the core parts work properly. I did make an appointment with a repair service to take a good look at it. The tone arm connector is worn out and has too much slack, the target light doesn’t work and I’d like to have the RCA cables replaced with better quality ones. And it has some kind of quick start cable that I would like to have removed. And the dust cover is pretty tatty and missing its hinges.

It came with no headshell, the seller offered the original but I declined since I already have an unused original headshell lying around and I was planning on putting a premounted Ortofon 2M Red on it anyway. Got that one in already, together with a nice Tonar Cork ‘n Rubber mat. Also ordered a Rega Fono Mini A2D phono preamp. This model comes with a builtin ADC with a Texas Instruments PCM2900C chipset, so 48kHz/16-bit. This can be very handy for spinning with time coded vinyl, no need to add an extra audio interface to the chain. And yes, already played around with that using Mixxx which works amazingly well.

Turntables II

Turntables

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What are the options these days when it comes to buying a new turntable that comes closest to what I already have without having to pay over 1000 Euros? So direct-drive, sturdy, reliable and decent sounding? Enter the Hanpin Super OEMs as they are called. These are the higher level Technics SL-1200 copies that are being branded under a myriad of different names:

  • Pioneer PLX-1000
  • SYNQ XTRM1
  • Reloop RP-7000 MK2
  • Reloop RP-6000 MK5 S
  • Omnitronic 5220/5250
  • Audio-Technica AT-LP1240
  • Mixars STA
  • Stanton ST-150

These are apparently all the same Hanpin DJ-5500 model with slightly varying features. Out of the above list only the Pioneer, SYNQ and Reloop RP-7000 MK2 models are currently available. But which one to choose? Inching toward the Reloop since that turntable has a height adjustable tone arm and personally I think it looks the best of all three contenders. But then this DJ-5500 design is like over 15 years old and apparently has some issues (hum with certain elements, anti-skating not working correctly) so maybe I should just go for another second hand SL-1200?

Argh, why didn’t I buy both SL-1200s back when I bought mine, together they were 700 Euros…

Turntables

Media units

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media_units_editThe MK808 Android TV stick with a PCM2704 USB audio interface runs Debian Jessie with MPD and serves as our mediaplayer for audio files. It draws its power from the USB port of our cable modem so it’s always on. Most of the time Indie Pop Rocks is playing. It’s hooked up to the network via WiFi. We use MPDroid to control it.

The Raspberry Pi runs OpenELEC with Kodi. We use this for watching all kinds of video files that we stream from our NAS (an aging WD My Book Live that runs Debian Lenny) via an NFS share. It is connected to the network via ethernet.

The Chromecast is for watching Netflix. When we just got it we had some issues with connecting it to the network but after replacing our old router with an ASUS RT-AC68U it worked flawlessly.

The Technics SL-1210MK2 with Ortofon headshell and cartridge is for listening music on vinyl, you know those round black plastic units from the past with grooves in them. It doesn’t have any network connections and doesn’t run an OS. It does send electrical current to a NAD C 325BEE Stereo Integrated Amplifier with Dali Concept 2 speakers. Yeah, I’m a 2.0 guy.

The TV is an old pre Smart TV Samsung but as it still works we probably won’t replace it for the time being. It does have CEC so we can control the TV, RPi and Chromecast with a single remote.

Media units