Restoring a Roksan Xerxes (original)... Wow!

[pankon]

I have recently restored my Roksan Xerxes, which I had purchased in the UK during my MSc studies in 1989. The exact model year of the turntable is unknown, but I estimate it to be around 1987.
So what I did is the following:

• Changed the blobs, which were rather stiff, with new Roksan blobs X3bi
• Cleaned and re-lubricated the main bearing with a few drops of oil
• Changed the belt with a new one from Origin Live
• Changed the tonearm (perviously Rega RB300) with an Audiomods Series 5, especially tuned for the new cartridge
• Changed the cartridge (previously Dynavector DV10x4 MkII) to a MusicMaker III

After all that, I sat to listen some of my old records. I have to admit that over the last years, my Roksan was somewhere in a corner, because at some point one of my kids had accidentally damaged the cantilever of my Dynavector cartridge and I had not done anything about it since then. It seems that I had grown accustomed to the ease-of-use of the CD and downloadable music from Spotify and Apple Music.

Well, it took only a few seconds of playing a record on the restored Xerxes again to remember what I had been missing...

Compared to the CD, the soundstage was wider and deeper, more palpable, more real, more convincing, with better separation of instruments and voices. Everything was much better. And the supposedly annoying record pops and clicks were so few that I would simply ignore.

Yes, people who still favor analogue sound are not crazy. And even if they are, I am happy to be one of them. Again!