I just couldn’t spend all the Christmas holiday time not doing something with the stereo, so just before the holidays I acquired a tonearm, that is on my “to try” list that probably couldn’t be sold new today for health reasons. This list contains quite a few tonearms that fall into the category, “why on earth would they want to do that” or just “that’s odd/interesting” type of thing – anyway this is one that I can cross off the list and I feel really lucky to have been able to get a totally NOS example.
Moving around the current arm mounts (my turntable is already kitted out with three tonearms) I had just enough room to squeeze in another freestanding arm ‘pod’ support for the tonearm, but as I’m not to sure this is going to stay long term was put together out of scraps in my garage junk box
It was a bit top heavy, so a modified mkII version had an added container on the based to mass load with lead shot.
So then all I needed to do was mount and set-up the cartridge, top-up the mercury wells. Someone’s already commented that I’m seem to be going for the “most toxic turntable” top slot and “had I thought of a beryllium arm tube?” ;-)
And start playing some records
Well it certainly sounds different, though not too sure I like what its doing, but I’ll give it a few weeks. So there we are; a 30-40 year old Keith Monks Audio Ltd M9Ba mercury tonearm, from my “to try” list, still got that RS Labs RS-A1 tonearm, the Nottingham Analogue Paragon parallel tracker, Opus Cantus parallel tracker, Dynavector DV507, …the list is quite long.
Paul
PS. Poor picture quality due to a fault with the camera/lens - can only shot with the aperture wide open :-(
