I bought this Thorens turntable because it has very good possabilities for upgrading and tweaking. Things I did already:
- Everywhere leadbitumes, on the sides, bottom, and inside and on top of the plateau. I had to adjust the springs to get
everything straight and well damped again.
- New bottom plate, it's now 4 mm aluminium. I made some holes in the bottomplate to minimize air resonances in the
enclosure.
- New arm, I made this arm of domesticated cherrywood. It's very good wood,
very straight lines in it, and very tough for it's weight. Inside it runs a copper tube, to shield the wires from distortion
from outside. This tube is glued in with a glue that doesn't get hard, to get good damping of the arm.
- New internal wiring, the wire is now van den Hul MCS-150 M,
matched crystal extruded pure silver.
- New cartridge, it runs now with the van den Hul MM-2.
It's like the MM-1, only with a better type needle.
- It's standing on a sandwitch stucture to reduce coupling of signal from the walls and stand. First is a concrete tile
(15 kilo's) on four halved tennis balls, then a steel plate (12 kilo's) on three spikes, then again three halved
tennisballs. Halved tennisballs really do a great job damping and are very cheap to get.
I like this turntable very much! It's better sounding than my CD-player, well don't do all turntables....? The
van den Hul MM-2 cartridge gave me very good placement also, the sound is very sensitive and real.
Technical data:
Drive : Belt driven turntable.
cartridge : Van den Hul MM-2.
Arm : Cherrywood, homemade.
internal Cable : Van den Hul MCS-150 M.
Standing table : 12 Kg Steel on three Audio selection spikes.
