I collected my new tt on the weekend, a whopping great Denon DP-80 with matching plinth, it's a sizeable beast that dwarfs the 1210 in terms of footprint and heft, it has a feel of dependable industrial precision when putting together with wonderful simplicity in operation, nothing fancy here, the variable pitch knob being the only 'tweaky' function. The plinth has a sub-plinth type base that house the adjustable feet that look fairly rudimentary. I've never had to worry about arm boards and the like before, but luckily this deck has a pre-drilled one together with a spare, the board itself is about 2 inches thick...eveything about this deck is solid and heavy.

I was lucky to have the option of a nice tonearm with this deck, this arm is a 10" Jelco SA-1100 mk4 limited edition. It's tri-point design with uni-pivot for the vertical axis and bearings for horizontal... I think What a lovely piece of engineering this arm is, the bearing housing is substantial and the whole thing is much heavier than I expected, it comes with two counterweights and the arm is wired with a silver loom as are the headshell leads. The bundled tonearm cable is rather nice too, I suspect it's the same as Marco's being a fetching fuscia with gold plugs. The arm's vta is adjusted by locking the sprung loaded turret with a bolt, again the simplicity of this arm is wonderful, handily it also came with a mounting template which was nice. I understand that these arms are hens teeth, and I can find nothing on t'interweb about them.

It's early days but this deck is a keeper for sure, it's pretty rare in this country and I dont feel like I would want form a vinyl front end. It has added gravitas, scale and outright slam over the excellent KAB 1210, it's just cut loose from restraint. I love it.