Like this a lot! Keep on designing and building. I am still designing my L75 plinth in my head and on the back of envelopes. Currently sidetracked (ha!) with construction of a sort of enhanced Roksan Xerxes plinth and isolators.
I'm back to doing my old job as a stereo installer. My customer has worked for Internet service providers, selling distribution systems for residential neighborhoods and corporate campuses. He strongly believes in having his main router/Wi-Fi streamer in the middle of the house, not buried away, for the best performance (he's right, BTW). It's on top of a new cabinet, under the main TV, while sitting nearby are the little boxes necessary for getting television and videos nowadays. His wife hated the clutter. I was not a fan of it, either. I made the following screen for them. I glued together a square cage, roughly 16 x 12 x 6 inches, afterward putting a reinforcing screw in each joint and painting it black. Using a double thick layer of scrim, I sewed together a three-sided cover for the box. Three sides of the box remained open. The edges of the scrim were held down by narrow wood strips and Gorilla Glue, perfect for the job with its expanding foam. The scrim is transparent to infrared remote controls. Velcro holds the little boxes onto the router but I also use string. I love string. String is my best buddy when it comes to simple hold-downs. I like the finished product. It looks clean.
Hi! After posting last summer my DIY turntable project has been dead in the water due to everything from personal family reasons to lack of motivation and then a sudden shortage of building material due to the war in Europe (who knew some of the main manufacturers of birch plywood are Russian and Ukraine...? Well now I do!). But now its slowly coming to life. I got the material but before letting the CNC mill rip in on the expensive stuff, I need to do some more practicing on cheap mdf and also some mockup parts to then do final cad adjustments. But I am feeling the fun in this project again ! Will keep ya posted on (hopefully) some progress later this spring.
Retro cool Musicmaster Model 12 (Gray Research clone) viscous damped tonearm restoration Karmadon 108 head shell slides (below) from my buddy Sergiy in Ukraine gave the tonearm a new lease of life. Tonearm rewired and fitted with a GE VRII triple play mono cartridge Click here for more details. Musicmaster Model 12 + GE VRII
I haven’t really done anything yet, but I’ve had a little free time to start cracking open my sp10 mkii to check the guts out and get a feel for how I’d mount the motor assembly in a new plinth, and have removed the brake for now. The last picture with the 4 red circles, those I believe will be the 4 mounting points that will allow me to move the motor to a new plinth and remove the very resonant metal frame that the motor sits in right now.
This will be my next project as well. I have the SP 10 as well as an Eminent Technologies EP2, just need time to build the plinth. I’d consider removing the motor and plinth as well, but I’m a little worried that added complexity might high center the project for to long.
I hear you, and that’s what I thought too, then once I started doing more research most of it is fairly straightforward outside of modifying the platter, which can always be done at a future point unlike a custom plinth. Trying to get a hold of panzerholz or primera is somewhat difficult and pricey in the US so that definitely influenced my decision to build once and build it right. I’m struggling mightily with what tonearm I’d like (leaning fr64s, still considering supatrac,) as well as how to go about mounting the tonearm in a way that will be flexible should I ever decide to change it out. If you want a ready made birch plinth for the sp10 utilizing the original base etc (not a nude mount,) let me know, it’s a nice enough plinth but I’d really like to try sandwiched panzer and get it all in a smaller package, ie no larger than 18” wide.
I’ve got a full wood shop, so the plinth is pretty straightforward for me. I plan to do constrained layers with resin and lead layers alternating with birch layers. Not entirely sure how I’ll do the arm board yet, part of me is tempted to go all in on my ET 2 arm, use captive wires, and mount straight to the plinth. Of course the second I do that I’ll find another arm I want to try on the table. What do you plan to do with all of the other electronics in the stock aluminum case?
I was going to leave the electronics in the stock case, maybe seat it in a simple wood frame, and run an umbilical to the motor from the case.
The Incredible Technics SP-10 Thread The very last post on that page of the thread from user Bon shows the umbilical he used. Bon, and user Warrjon, among a few others, have done some pretty inspiring work on these. I also hear you on the tonearm. Maybe just go kuzma 4point 14” Warrjon’s latest iteration can have 4 tonearms, fit any size he wants using cantilever mounts he’s made, or use a linear tracker.
I tend to get access to some crazy stuff from time to time, things like 14” 4 points, and have a flexible arm mount might prove to be a prudent choice. That thread is kind of like the Bible for this project. I’ve actually spoken with Jim about the table a few times.
I posted plans for a MM phono cartridge loading board somewhere earlier in this thread. Then I thought I'd change it to match a PP999 phono preamp. Project creep has settled in again, though, and now I've wondered whether I can actually build a MM phono preamp using an amalgamation of the PP999 phono preamp schematic, the reference phono schematic from the OPA164X docs, and eventually my DIY loading aspect. I have some leftover copper-clad board from making my PLLXO (Passive Line Level XOver) I use for bi-amping. And an identical enclosure (I ordered a spare enclosure because I needed extra face plates after biffing one or two). So the plan is to re-use materials on-hand to build a first prototype and see how it works, hopefully maintaining the low-noise aspect, pleasant sound, etc. My PLLXO project was pretty crude so I've tried to determine whether my CAD/CAM app can be adapted to make something like a phono preamp board. This took a while but I figured out procedures for doing so, and cut a sample board on a piece of scrap copper clad to verify this works. I'm doing everything (routing traces, drilling holes, cutting external profile) with a single bit, which speeds the process quite a bit. So now I just need to verify this layout a bit more, then cut another board and see if I can assemble it and make it work as well as my modded PP999. DC jack will be centered, each side of the board will be one channel in and out. This simplifies the layout and allows me to do this on a single sided board w/o any jumpers.
Way back in post #7 of this thread, almost one year ago, I posted a prototype for a tube preamp I was trying to get off the ground. Today, it's finally complete. Thank you to those who helped and encouraged along the way.
It's only two layer. There's no ground plane as such, but large areas of ground pour in the non-high-voltage areas and sections of empty space within high voltage areas. When able, I just stitched the top and bottom layers of these together. Well, at the moment, just imagine a slight hum . Having the meters on, which are connected across each cathode resistor, produces an unacceptable hum. Anticipating problems with this, I've used a 4 pole switch to completely disengage them from the circuit if required. But it still hums a little, which wasn't present in the previous version of the build. I have altered the grounding slightly in this new version (for the better I thought), but the fundamentals are the same so it's a bit of a mystery at this point.
Cut my 2nd test board to check the fit of the DC and RCA jacks. I drew the jacks from the spec sheets and accidentally flipped the orientation of the DC jack. But the DC jack fits from the copper side so as long as I flip the jack in the drawing and re-cut, it will fit properly on the component side (where it belongs). Next-up is to change bits to a down-cutting spiral, which should improve the cut quality. Right now I'm getting a burr around the traces, the down-cut should fix that hopefully without causing any new issues. The down-cut cutting length is a bit longer than the up-cut, so probably not as sturdy a bit and I'm hoping I can still drill the holes and cut the board shape all with the same bit. Provided that I can make that work, I'll order some liquid tin so I can tin the board, which will prevent corrosion problems, then order the parts I need to stuff the board so I can test it out. And provided that works, I can move onto adapting my loading board to fit in front of this one, in the enclosure. This may seem like an enormous waste of time and money, to make a DIY MM phono preamp when so many off-the-shelf options are available. But I'm learning and having some fun, so...
Yes birch ply is now very pricy for an 8x4 sheet. My DIY Walker sub chassis is made from 1 inch thick birch ply I acquired before that war started. I am now experimenting with beech block board off cuts from a kitchen worktop given to me by a carpenter friend 30 years ago. I am liking some of the sonic properties this material gives and will use it for a new base board for one of my turntable creations. The beech grain is very fine and it feels weighty. Admittedly, I am using beech in single components of modular structures which can be substituted if they don’t work as well as hoped. It’s a much more risky and costly experiment when bonding a unknown material into a complete turntable structure. But to my ears it sounds better than MDF, at least in turntable arm boards. I have no experience of beech in larger structures yet. The price of beech has gone up by 50% over the last few years, but not sure why. We had a lot of beech trees blown down in UK storms in 1987 and 1991 and I suspect the slab I cut components out of came from that time.
