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I hear ya Tony - Mike New bearing £465ish, ETP £650 aprox, (funk quoted £840 for one of their platters) :eek: then there's external power supply, cartridge, decent arm - Yep ! It's scary but in my experience worth it There are so many variables to be considered and it's not like these items are mass produced which would bring cost down.
Just go easy, dont try to do it all at once, enjoy the music and dont lose too much sleep ! ;)
They're not mass produced. Very much hand crafted. The old Funk platter is used by Marco and others with the Mike New bearing. Goodness only knows what Arthur has been smoking - or if there is a difference, but I think Marco, Neil and Martin (at least 2 of whom have MN bearings) were due to try the new Funk platter. I trust it was Arthur you spoke to Al, and not the tea lady. Apart from platter material itself, the machining process and stressing and the likes, there is the issue of balance made tricky by the need for castings or machinings (the stock techie is cast), and the consequent affect on the servo loading.
Anyway - the bearing fit is only a hub - so given the "hand made" element will be easy to do a "Mike New Special". But I would be near certain there is no difference and one size fits all.
Although I still haven't seen a pic in the public domain, I know Neil has one to evaluate, so it can no longer be a NATO secret, that Arthur has moved onto composite materials from Acrylic this time, using bonded glass (using some special glue he keeps hidden in a draw) in itself bonded to acrylic. Dead. Rigid. Made me want one for my PT - which reminds me I need to chase up on this.
Of course, as I have noted before, by the time you have bought a platter, bearing, power supply, arm, feet and mat, you could have bought another turntable. It's no longer an SL1210 - just a custom build using a technics 2nd-hand DD motor :)
There are other alternatives at the lower end of the price range.
Inspire HiFi will sell you just the platter off one of there Technics based TT’s.
They do a solid Alloy job which is in the price area of those already mentioned but they also do a modified Techie platter for about £250 like this one.
http://i835.photobucket.com/albums/z...ps95e7e9f2.jpg
I am personally looking at the possibility of adapting a Pro-Ject RPM 9 Platter and bearing to work with the Technics Motor/Magnet arrangement. Its early days and I need some bits to take accurate measurements, but if it's feasible would make an interesting alternative approach – 38mm Acrylic platter with an inverted bearing running on a 10mm ceramic tipped spindle! :eyebrows:
There's another thread on here discussing arm wires - with a significant number concluding it is not the most cost effective thing to do. I find a certain wry amusement here (it is mostly the cable-phobic coming to that conclusion). I am not keen on getting carried away with cable "phoo", as I think many realise, but I think speaker cables important, and IC's for real, surely the most real of all the IC's, and the one which is most likely to affect the tiny wee signals that travel down to the amplifier is the tonearm cable. That said - assuming the original wiring is not faulty, improving the wiring on an arm is not where most of the improvement is to be had. It's not where there is the most bang for buck. When I sent my dieing Mission 774 down to A K for a rewire and got an F5 back, the difference in sound between the 2 arms had nothing to do with the wires used in the F5. Not irrelevant - but the final icing on the cake. Spending any significant amount on rewiring a "basic" arm (and I think most would accept the stock arm on the Techie falls into that category) is not going to change it into an SMEV or a Grace, nor an Fx2.
This link goes to Mikes web site
http://www.mikenewaudio.com/
And this is the ETP platter I have ordered