Hi, I am Lourens, I am new to AVForums. I though to introduce myself and my first audio project.
A friend gave my wife a few LP's with the message; see if you can do something with these. She brought them home and I saw them and there were a few that I really wanted to hear. I also have friends that love their LP's so I though that I should explore the idea. I went to Game and bough myself my first turntable:
Played a few records and were not happy with it but what to do about it? I Googled around for a bit and realized that there was nothing to do. The player is a piece of crap and no amount of setup an or tuning is going to fix that. I looked around for a second hand turntable for weeks but couldn't find anything. (Must have been a dry spell, I have seen a few since. )
While Googling I came across the Altmann tonearm.
My first thought was: 'That works?!'. My second was: 'I can do better'. So, I built my first tonearm(Sorry I took no pictures). It was an ugly and very short (< 20cm, to fit the ION ); but with the Ortofon OM cartridge it sounded a LOT better than the ION arm. But it was ugly! So I built another, based on the well tempered tonearm. It sounded great:
(It's still ugly though, interesting ugly but ugly.)
Then I came across a very abused Teac PX 550 turntable and rebuilt it using some hardwood from an abandoned renovation project.
A brain fart then lead to this tone arm that uses a Stanley blade instead of a golf ball to look weird. The cartridge came from the Teac. I found a stylus for it from a friend. I will put the Ortofon on here soon to see if I can hear a difference.
This time I mounted it on the turntable which makes this my second complete turntable:
This is not the end. I have more tonearm designs to try out and I need to find a way to evaluate the quality of what I am doing that is better than my very inexperienced ears. The Teac had a direct drive motor and great as it is I would like to build a turntable with a brush-less DC motor as well.
Regards
Lourens Coetzer
A friend gave my wife a few LP's with the message; see if you can do something with these. She brought them home and I saw them and there were a few that I really wanted to hear. I also have friends that love their LP's so I though that I should explore the idea. I went to Game and bough myself my first turntable:
Played a few records and were not happy with it but what to do about it? I Googled around for a bit and realized that there was nothing to do. The player is a piece of crap and no amount of setup an or tuning is going to fix that. I looked around for a second hand turntable for weeks but couldn't find anything. (Must have been a dry spell, I have seen a few since. )
While Googling I came across the Altmann tonearm.
My first thought was: 'That works?!'. My second was: 'I can do better'. So, I built my first tonearm(Sorry I took no pictures). It was an ugly and very short (< 20cm, to fit the ION ); but with the Ortofon OM cartridge it sounded a LOT better than the ION arm. But it was ugly! So I built another, based on the well tempered tonearm. It sounded great:
(It's still ugly though, interesting ugly but ugly.)
Then I came across a very abused Teac PX 550 turntable and rebuilt it using some hardwood from an abandoned renovation project.
A brain fart then lead to this tone arm that uses a Stanley blade instead of a golf ball to look weird. The cartridge came from the Teac. I found a stylus for it from a friend. I will put the Ortofon on here soon to see if I can hear a difference.
This time I mounted it on the turntable which makes this my second complete turntable:
This is not the end. I have more tonearm designs to try out and I need to find a way to evaluate the quality of what I am doing that is better than my very inexperienced ears. The Teac had a direct drive motor and great as it is I would like to build a turntable with a brush-less DC motor as well.
Regards
Lourens Coetzer
