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My treasure – "Wrinkles like grooves brings audio wisdom" - 'Playing with LP player (Part 1)' By Otomeijin (Nov. 25, 2005) I took a rest after "amp making course" which I started from Online Newsletter vol. 137 in the style of old audio story. Even though we auctioned off my finished amp I made with minutest care at a half the sales price of it, less than the price of the kit, for the starting bid, nobody placed a bid. I've got the "guts up?" to move on while getting over from that shock. By the way, we shouldn't forget about analogue-oriented equipments or soft which have gave us the pleasure of audio for a long time, though soft we usually use has changed into CD or SACD as digital equipments have developed now. Yes, that's right. I am talking about record, tape and FM the icons of introductory audio equipments. No matter what people say, what laypeople can touch and have fun among these is the record player. So I will talk about "Playing with LP player".
You may understand the composition of the player by general classification as follows. (1) Case or Stand (2) Turntable (including Drive unit) (3) Arm (4) Cartridge and Shell I think there are few cases that people build a record player since it has become difficult to purchase each unit noted above after CD has prevailed these days. Instead, beautiful and technologically advanced players are available recently even though they are very expensive. Each one of them is well-made. I think maybe that's because they are equipments that face us who put precious records and a needle on.
Anyway let me confirm the characteristics the player must have, whether you buy the finished product or not. And to go for that direction is "playing". I'm sorry but the "teaching material" for me is my afterimage like always.
(1) Case or Stand The necessary characteristic for audio (sound-wise) would be "stableness". You need to use your ingenuity to stable audio equipments not to be influenced by the vibration from the speakers, the room and the motor. You may come up with some ideas like having hard, heavy and vibration-resistant case or stand, separating equipments from each other, or minimize the vibration by absorbing it. You should do something about it in these kinds of way you know or the way you can get as far as possible. The insulator plays a specific role for that purpose as part (legs) of the stand as you may know. (2) Turntable (including Drive unit) Make it not to transmit the vibration of the motor. Here again, you need to control the vibration. Of course turning around accurately, evenly and quietly is the main thing. First of all, it should be the well-made direct drive type or belt drive type. We used to use the idler type with a rubber band mostly. So the more we played, the more we heard the motor noise and the transmission vibration. The turntable seems to get affected by the air vibration pretty much due to its large surface. Besides it looks like an umbrella opened above the spindle and already weak against the vibration. So the heavy-duty and vibration-resistant (fast-damped) material seems better for it. Of course the enough weight to achieve the flywheel effect is also necessary for smooth spinning. (3) Arm It must have no backlash, be highly accurate and move smoothly with appropriate strength (expressed analogue-wise) and less noise which sounds beautiful. This "noise" means the sound coming directly from the cartridge arm when a record played without using speakers. Yes! It's the noise of phonograph. Arm is the product of "compromise" in my opinion. For instance, if the vibration gets strong, generally it becomes heavy and its inertia grows, then it tends to becomes difficult to move easily. Also when you try to minimize the tracking error the arm will become longer though, it's the finite-length space-wise and its inertia or flexure will go wrong. Arm plays the leading part visually also in the player. In years gone by, there used to be many kinds of arm competing in the market. Now, several kinds of arm called great equipment seems available sometimes in the market. Like I said before, you can enjoy making it by yourself. Curiously enough, you may find little difference between yours and major manufacturer's in performance. Although there would be a lot of near works, you can find a way out with some ingenuity. Here is an example of my best friend. I will ask him later on to write on his struggling days of making arm, so please don't miss out his story. He is the person who brought up the visit of Takajo system in the "Online Newsletter vol. 141, - 'A Salon in a Vision'". (4) Cartridge and Shell The power generation method and its mechanism should be linear and the vibration needs to be as little as possible. And, it should have a proper structure/output(good S/N ratio) that doesn't get influenced by noises. Since the vibration unit always has the sympathetic vibration of itself, so it better be outside the listening range. I will write about this "playing" in detail next time. Anyway I will show you my messy "playing" as below. Each of them is what I noticed for some effects each time.

The above example consists of a part of the drawing and a picture. The assembly of each part is properly described. I wonder how much the carbon fiber pipe cost. The following picture is an example of my "money saver" idea.

Like I wrote before, I started off with a record player consisting of CEC turntable and Primo crystal pickup in the case made by this manufacturer called Pyramid. Later on I replaced with Neet oil damped arm and used Sound C-2 monaural cartridge in order to go with the full-fledged equipment though, I mainly focused on the later-mentioned light needle pressure thing for my playing. At that time nobody paid attention on record cases or stands as far as no acoustic feedback occurred. During I lived in a dormitory after I started working about 40 years ago I missed the music so much, so I built a stereo system. Here are some pictures and parts of that. The black and white pictures are from times while in the dorm. Trio kit tuner, Coral germanium transistor amp, string driven player of my own making with custom-made box of my own design and Grace leaf spring type dynamic balance arm. It's a 20-cm coaxial (8CX50) and custom-made box speaker of my own design. This speaker fell into someone's hands though; I found two neat original packages for that in the closet at home. I found some miscellaneous notes inside and a post card with price information written on it at the time of purchase, which Mr. K.K researched. (A picture below)

The custom-made box may sound really a big deal though, I just handed a drawing of my design and asked a joiner near my office to make as it describes. I ordered 10 SP boxes of the same kind for 5 people I randomly found and we carried them into our dormitory. It looked pretty spectacular(?). I remember that the box was covered by 20mm homogentisic lauan and cost 5,000 yen for each pair. I used it until around 1985 with replacing arm. The pulley I put beside the black and while pictures is the string driven one. This single pulley covered 33 to 45 spins at 50/60Hz. Its variable speed mechanism is simple. Please take a look at my sketch. If the string guide roller part is raised up, it is LP, and if lowered, it is EP. The string tries to constantly go up due to taper, but it will become stable if held by the guide roller. It took 4 or 5 seconds to start up though, there was no problem. The thick cotton thread was good enough for the string and I replaced it with a brand new one once every year. The tension of the string can be controlled by a screw on the surface where the motor is installed. I used the quadrupolar synchronous motor for spinning. When I replaced with Pioneer player in the picture on top because of my housing problem I threw this away, but I kept the weighing table only without being able to dispose it. It weighs 11kg itself. (In the right picture) you may be able to find some nostalgic "improvement?". Each improvement was like "Yeah, right on!" or "It doesn't look any different", I think. Now I can't stop regretting that I didn't keep the whole player.

This is the backside of the weighing table. It is controlled by a hard block of wood and some aluminum channel that I got from somewhere. I remember that this way of controlling raised the acoustic feedback level and made the sound calm. When knocked, it sounds like thrum. Also the plate where the motor is installed and the turntable plate are separated from each other to block off the vibration from the motor. You can see a line in the black-and-white picture.
	This is the backside of the turntable. I damped with putty after glued unnecessary turntable sheet. It sounded "diiiing" when I tapped it on, but it changed to like "ding" after I damped. Due to the secular change, it is wrinkled now and so hard because the oil vaporized. However, the shaft and the bearing are not rusty at all. What lubricant do you think I used? Well I wanted to say it is grease though, actually it is pomade from Yanagiya. I thought that clearness must have shown its high-purity. But still, this pomade is really stable maybe because it is for skin. Even now this turntable spins as smooth as in those days.

It is like this. This arm looks just like SME arm. I feel kind of embarrassed as if I were in some country of today when I think back around those days. I also damped the arm pipe with putty, which turned out effective and decreased the some noise volume and distortion feel. I could found the butyl effect on shell only a little bit though. The turntable is 32cm in diameter, which is uncommon in size at that time. This is the one which I have the Neet subcontractor made based on my drawing with one of the table casting for test model that I've got from them. Especially it has the stepped edge in order to make it easy to take up a record. (I remember that Neet didn't release this kind of turntable after all.) To be continued.

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