The winter seems endless this year, we have had bouts of snow and outbreaks of cold lately, last Tuesday morning the temperature was down to -17 C when I left for work. A lot of ships are stuck in the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia and the icebreakers are working 24/7
But the light is back, the sun is rising a little bit more every day and we have temperatures exceeding 0 C regulary every afternoon when it's not cloudy.
The return of the sun brings inspiration and that Pete Townshend vinyl I found last month triggered me to bring out my moms old record player from the garage into the house and take a look at it as my old turntable left the house along with Lukas last year.
The record player-tuner-amplifier combo is a HEA Stereo 3040 FM from 1974 and the interesting part is the turntable itself, a Lenco L78, made in Switzerland, built like a tank and virtually indestructable, the platter itself weighs close to 4 kg and the rubber mat close to 1 kg! There is an overdimensioned squirrel cage shielded pole motor inside, big enough to rotate a big hammer drill. The tonearm is not any top of the line SME or Decca but it is not far from those. In the headshell sits a decent cartridge from Pickering, a XV-15/625E
Said and done, I gave it a test drive some weeks ago, the turntable worked OK but the sound was unbalanced, faint and crappy.
As the amplifier specified as 2x15 Watt RMS at 8 ohm is a typical solution for the seventies it was not hard to track down the problems, some dried out electrolytic capacitors had to be changed, the idle current and voltage symmetry to be adjusted. As the final touch I changed the 6" woofers in the speaker boxes to new ones with huge magnets and converted the boxes to bass reflex boxes.
Now there is sound enough... :)
This is going to be an intermediate solution though, the Lenco L78 is going to be tweaked and tuned to perform even better and will get a new solid undercarriage and the amplifier will be disposed off and replaced with a tube amplifier, maybe a single ended class A solution 2x20w using KT 88:s or Russian GU 50:s
When all this is going to happen is another issue...
