Pre-amp Circuits for turntable MM or MC reproduction Apologies for the lack of updates over the last few weeks, our scribe has been off ill for a few weeks. Here’s to a new session of articles and hopefully a little bit of invigoration to our framework. The true value of Vinyl It’s amazing how times change – […]
Where to get vintage gear spares? Over the last 6 months I have received quite a few mails from desperate individuals wishing to restore their old radios, tube and semiconductor, integrated amplifiers, turntables and tape decks. Belts and power supplies and many semiconductors have equivalents but we get stuck with Germanium, decals, knobs and switches with most […]
The A/D Converter – pushing vinyl to digital The common and garden DAC can be picked up cheaply at most electronic stores, ready to run straight from your CD player through optical (Toslink) or coax and used to drive your analogue only system. Although these little units are cheap by comparison to high end products being portable […]
Is vintage audio better than modern releases? (post 2000) This reminds me of the first argument I had regarding the merits of mechanical VU meters over LED. Yeah, we like vintage stuff, especially with those big VU meters. Hell, I was looking at the specs of the Pioneer SX-1980 the other evening and thought what a beast […]
Why do we use RIAA? To kick off, and this is a response to forum user “Roggies” request for a schematic for a budget quality tube pre-amp for MC cartridges. Unfortunately MC never has a cheap solution and that’s the bottom line. MM may be getting better but phono die-hards are still going to have to dig […]
The DAC and digital sound – big quality at half the expense Coming from an analog website it may sound as if we are doing a 180 here but the truth remains, we still have the analog versus digital argument. Something which will never quite be put to bed, the digital war continues. My first CD player […]
New buttons for the Technics SL-1200 The Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable is still very much in demand. So much so that when manufacture stopped in 2010 an army of DJs got together and requested Matsushita – Panasonic to continue with the model. Yes, it was relaunched tail end of last year for a staggering amount – have […]
And the final outcome: Magnetic tape beats vinyl. Well we don’t really know about this one but based on our research this seems to be the case. But let us be realistic. A good turntable is going to put us back about R7 000 to R8 000 and then we are only just starting up our engines. […]
Akai M8 test – Turntable reproduction Obviously the final test will be the recording of and playback of material but at this stage 7″ reel tapes are in scarce supply but have ordered through eBay from Netherlands 🙂 so will do a quick recording of the actual analog signal on a digital recorder, the Zoom H6. Hey […]