Turntable Advice Wanted.

[DaveK]

Hi all,
After tonight playing some 30 year old LPs kindly cleaned by Marco I have re-discovered vinyl. My TT is also 30 years old, but with a new cartridge. It is a Sony PS-LX 100, with very short, as supplied, bog standard, phono interconnects, solder connected inside the case. Inside there appears to be minimum circuitry, transistors or other new fangled electronic bits and pieces.
Question 1) Would it benefit from having some better quality (and longer, for convenience), phono leads soldered in to replace the original leads?
Question 2) If so, does anyone know anyone who could do this for me?
Question 3) Are there any other cost effective mods that could be made to improve the quality of the output.
My aim is to avoid the urge to invest, any time soon, in a new TT.
For further information, just in case it influences any response, the TT connects to the Phono input of my Marantz PM6010OSE KI amp and thence on to MS Mezzo 2 speakers.
All responses, either positive or negative (as long as they are polite ), will be welcome.

[Haselsh1]

I personally think that you would be very pleasantly surprised by a change of phono interconnects. Although I'm not going to recommend any as this is incredibly personal, my own previous experience was amazing. I now use Van Den Hul hybrid cables as the treble is just soooooo sweet...!

[Yiangos]

dave&Sue,whatever you do,if you haven't allready,don't go for longer than 1m cable, max 1.2m and i mean it as an absolute maximum ! A phono cartridge's signal is very weak and deligate.Keep the arm cable as short-as-possible,otherwise you'll hear more noise than music.

[DaveK]

Thanks Haselsh1 (beautiful photos BTW) and Yiangos,
Current position is that my local TV and Audio repair man has replaced the original short phono leads with (hopefully better quality and) longer phono leads. The new length is now 1m (thanks Yiangos).
My understanding of high quality phono leads (where the TT does not have female phono sockets) is that they should be silver soldered in place - unfortunately my local guy does not offer this service.
My long term aim is to replace my current TT with a SL-1200 which enjoys a very high reputation with AoS members - maybe at that time I reconsider high quality phono leads.
Thanks again,

[DSJR]

There are loads of joins in a phono circuit from cartridge coils to the amp's phono input, so removing just one join on a budget turntable isn't going to change much to be honest.

Regarding interconnect length, the main problem is capacitance. Some cartridges like many Shures like a high capacitance loading, others aren't bothered and a good few like the loading as low in capacitance as possible. MC's aren't bothered by this though and I've used a 2m length from arm to MC input with no losses or hum pickup.

To put things into perspective, the FM signal carried by an aerial wire is several orders of magnitude lower in level and far, far higher in frequency than anything that comes out of a pickup cartridge, so don't be too afraid to experiment if you need to, as long as the loading seen by the cartridge is acceptable for its design..

Finally, decent cabling is very cheap to buy and decent plugs don't cost the earth either. Most foo cables have far less than a tenner's worth of materials but can sell for many hundreds of pounds - an absolute ripoff and one reason why the audio industry is so far removed from "real life" these days. I like the idea of Mark Grant and Action Hardware for phono to phono wires, Flashback Sales for Naimie wires and Jonny at Audio Origami for arm re-wiring - this latter doesn't charge a huge amount for his labours and each arm is treated individually.