Vinyl for those who might not know are LP’s or albums. 12″ of old fashioned joy, spinning at 33 and 45RPM. Here is an overview of my original and current vinyl replay equipment:
- Thorens TD160 Super turntable and Hadcock GH228 Super arm – (seven ball pivot bearing)
- Phoenix Engineering Roadrunner speed display and Falcon RoadRunner speed control.
- Lentek Entre 1 moving coil cartridge – (now replaced-see below)
- Lentek Head Amplifier
All this hardware was purchased back in the UK when I was working in the recording industry. I have only just upgraded this replay chain (7/14/2019) as I found that based upon A/B comparisons at that time, that this hardware provided an excellent and tonally accurate rendition of the master tapes.
This entire vinyl replay chain was rebuilt and upgraded, see this post.
Recent Upgrades – 7/14/2019
My phono cartridge and head amplifier have just been upgraded to:
- Hana SL
- Musical Fidelity MX-VYNL Pre-Amplifier – (currently used in conjunction with the Lentek Head Amplifier)
My Original Stereo System
For those interested, the stereo audio system used when I worked in the UK recording industry was composed of:
- Mordaunt Short MS600 speakers. Fane or Celestion 12” rubber-roll studio bass unit and Decca Kelly DK30 ribbon. The passive crossovers and DK30 lenses were removed and the speakers were bi-amped using the amplifiers below.
- Radford ZD22 pre amplifier.
- Quad 405 power amplifier driving the bass units.
- Leak TL50 plus valve power amplifiers driving the DK30 ribbons.
- Custom designed all analog electronic crossovers. (sorry no pictures)
Everything above, except the speakers, were built by me. I even still have the photographic foil artwork for all the PCB’s together with all the maintenance and service manuals. Unfortunately, I sold everything except the MS600’s when I left England, a decision I will always regret. Selling the MS600’s was not quite so heart breaking.
