It's a stamped part, and apparently there is no step in the manufacturing process to clean the edges. Clean edges can also be achieved by better tooling. Yeah, quite unusual for Japanese manufacturing. I guess they slowly start getting poisoned by common attitude: if you don't see it-it doesn't matter.
The lifter on my G is smooth and slow and feels great. Much different than the 1500C and 100C I owned.
Wow, I checked this and it really seems like in 2021 Technics moved production to Malaysia. I remember when they did the restart, the MK7 was the cheapest one and made in Malaysia, but now all TTs? So for me they totally lost their USP, which was the MK2-Heritage and „made in Japan“, there is nothing Pioneer or Hanpin can‘t do. And the price didn‘t change either, so its all about profit optimization. Well, I have my two MK2, and my friend can be happy to have his GR Japan version, but the Technics myth is lost for me.
If someone put 2 1200G tables (1 made in Japan, 1 made in Malaysia) in front of you and removed the “made in stickers,” I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
Yeah but everyone would pick the Japanese provided stickers on. I'd never pay G money for a Malaysia made.
On the topic of the tonearm lift/cueing lever, there should be no impact to things like VTA if I raise the cueing platform, right? I don't love how close it is to the record and just wanna raise it like 5-6mm but I don't wanna throw everything out of whack and have to re-adjust if that's the case.
Nope, VTA won’t move. I put mine higher pretty early on, and I think that may be one of the main reasons I don’t understand the complaints people have about the cueing.
Received my 1200GR about a week ago and the cueing was the biggest pet peeve of mine. I ended up adjusting it, so it's all good now, but I was surprised how finicky it was right out of the box--it had my cartridge sitting super low and would hit the record before even moving the cue mechanism down all the way (hopefully I am explaining it in a way that makes sense). This seems to be the one area where my AT-LP120 has the GR beat. The lever on that TT was super smooth.
I feel like if Technics just set that lever up higher so it comes that way out of the box, there might be almost no complaints about this.
Yes, it has a significant adjustment range, and it's explained pretty clearly in the manual. When you set it up relatively high, you can just drop the lever fast, and let the 'hydraulic' do the job. Then it's quite smooth. The whole thing feels cheap, plasticky, but works fine.
Perf, had a hard time figuring it out and had to read the manual haha. I assumed it was "loosen then lift" but it's just turning the screw and letting it do all the work.
On the GR Set cuing ~15 mm Don't lower lever slowly to control the arms rate of descent Just push it down swiftly and count how long it takes the stylus to contact mine is a bit higher, over 2 sec, close to 3 sec Assuming 20 mm, 2.5 sec, vtf 2 gm Impact force 0.0000064 newton = 0.000653 gram-force
Absolutely. I certainly complained when I first got it. It was within spec and I had VTA all the way down at zero, so it didn’t seem like something that needed to be fiddled with, but after raising it, it behaved much more like other levers I’ve used.
I realized at some point in these discussions here this is something people may be trying to do — treating the cue lever like it’s an extension of their finger lowering the arm. I can’t imagine why that would be the approach. I think of it just like a switch, and I flip it down or up accordingly. Switch down, tonearm lowers. Switch up, it lifts.
My Malaysian-built Technics SL-1200GR works fine. The cueing lever, and all the adjustments for VTA, overhang and azimuth are a breeze. I sometimes wish I waited to buy the SL-1200G.
I recently purchased a new SL-1200G from Music Direct. The whole experience has been very disappointing. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, as I really didn’t want to spend that much on a turntable right now, but was willing to if it going to be perfect. To start, whoever packed it barely used any packing material, so the product box was able to shift around a lot within the shipping box. The motor bearing had play that was very easy to feel and even perceive visually. With the platter mounted, you could gently press one side of the platter and it would very obviously rock. As if this weren’t bad enough, the tonearm tube was misaligned clockwise, so that the front of the headshell was angled up. I sent it back, they sent me a replacement, and it had the exact same play in the motor bearing. The tonearm tube may or may not have been better aligned; I didn’t keep it out of the box for long enough to really check. These are ridiculous issues for such an expensive turntable to have. I’m not going to blame it on being manufactured in Malaysia, either. Technics is more than capable of making excellent quality products wherever they choose. It’s too bad, as the tonearm cueing lever and VTA lock felt really nice and didn’t have the issues commonly found on the GR.
I sympathize with your issues and concerns, though with regard to the spindle bearing, I believe the motor is mounted with some compliance, I don't think Technics rigidly follows the design ethos of tying the platter and tonearm closely together as in some other tables, so a small amount of platter depression when you push on one side may be expected and isn't necessarily an indication of bearing play, others could verify ... The Technics SL-1200 GAE/G/GR general questions thread