Them Changes - autochangers

[Barry]

Hello Dave,

If you look carefully at Chris's last posting (#9), you can, with some thought, see how the lift mechanism works.

The spigot of both the record storage, and of the turntable itself, is an adjustable internal collet. The record selector arm also has an internal collet which can fit inside the record hole, yet not conflict with the spigot collet.

Clearly a very complicated mechanism to get everything to work in the correct order - with ample opportunity for things to go wrong. Hence my facetious comment: "the ultimate cuckoo clock".

Clever these Swiss!

[hifi_dave]

Clever indeed but very expensive to repair if it goes wrong as mine did. I found an engineer willing to do the job but he needed a few parts to be made, as there are no spares and that was getting very pricey with no guarantee it would then work.

I do regret selling it though. Even working as a single player, it was a work of art.

[The Grand Wazoo]

Any takers for an 8 track autochanger?!?!?!

[Jack Williams]

"Robojock"
Garrard Type A.
Side pusher rather than centre muncher.
Frequency locked synchronous motor.
Really heavy decoupled cast iron platter!
With my mods it operates at one gram.
Long ago the massive clunky original arm replaced by Pritchard rosewood arm I happened to have at the time.
Current cartridge: Garrett Bros P66 "Dynamic Coil" high output moving coil.
For a long time I used a Shure M75ED.
Everyone is highly impressed with the sound of this machine.
It'll stack a dozen, but for 12" EPs I use a "Sonic Research" acryllic hard mat for six records optimizing the VTA. About a dozen 7" 45s on the original mat. It does depend on the thickness of the records. Ten of 78s, but not with this cartridge! I have a 78 stylus for the Shure, and used to add a coin to the top for those.
I do need an extra Pritchard head shell!

[Jack Williams]

A couple of wee mods I added which are not very noticeable in these photographs.
The Decca Lifter I added so that you could "pause" if the phone rang without rejecting the record.
The other one is the little stylus cleaning brush on a spring, as in a jukebox, which scrubbs the stylus between records!
The decoupling under the cast iron (which is heavier than the aluminium one on the 301) was a donut of foam. Currently I have two donuts of blister pack with a felt one in between.

[Jack Williams]

When I was a young apprentice at Akrad, Ron Skinner, one of the supervisors at the time, used to take us for night classes.
In the "radiograms" they made, the turntables were horrible BSR, Collaro etc rubbish, and I wanted to get my HiFi good. I already had 5 cubic foot one and a quarter inch ply huge speakers in my mum's sitting room!
He said: Garrard have come up with this Type A. It's a side pushing changer with heavy decoupled platter etc. We're not going to use them, but I can get you one out from Garrard as a sample if you like.
Good old Garrard! They shouted me this wonderful machine! It could be the only one in the country.
Has anyone else on the site got one?
It's certainly way ahead of any old 301!

[Alex_UK]

What a fantastic contraption! Congrats.

Side pusher rather than centre muncher

Sounds like a girl I used to know!

[The Grand Wazoo]

Thanks for this Jack, that's a fascinating changing system, I've never seen that before. I took a look at a few You Tube videos of this machine.

This one has the most incredible dust cover:



I like the way the little bar by the tonearm comes across to presumably measure the size of the next record, so the arm knows where to land:

[DSJR]

I once had the predecessor model RC88/4, which in my case with a VERY powerful brushed motor and an external fixed resistor coil-in-a-cage that got extremely hot as I remember. Lovely slick mechanism though and directly related to the Lab Series model which replaced it. The RC88 allowed normal centre hole 7" records to be stacked too, the pusher assembly coming right out to allow this which the Lab and descended Lab 80 models didn't do (platter gets in the way on the Lab model) without the large centre hole adaptor.



The Lab 80 mk2 I bought from Adam is still running superbly, just needing a idler grind or a proper replacement with the softer compound to fully quieten it down. This later model uses an "umbrella" type of centre hole support, which is gentle as the Duals are with a similar system. Unlike the Duals though, this spindle has to be lifted out when removing a stack of records..


A word in defence of Collaro/Magnavox.. Their decks needed Dual like refinement (as in the 1019 and 1219 etc etc) as they were superbly made and with decent motors etc. The changing mech used the little centre spindle pusher as garrard and BSR used, but there was a refinement in the Conquest model (at least) in that the stack was lowered down on the "step" before the pusher part sprung back. I love the way the arm feels the record size too - the Conquest started it for me as a toddler and I'll always have fond memories of it.



Collaro did do much to the design in the early 70's, but by this time it was too late, sadly. These later models can still be got in the US in good order cheaply and I suspect would actually "sound" quite good too with a durable modern cartridge fitted - counterbalanced tonearms with bias and cueing, rubber decoupled motors (old models had the motor bolted tight to the plate causing noise) and heavier cast platters.

[Beobloke]

"Robojock"
Garrard Type A.
Side pusher rather than centre muncher.
Frequency locked synchronous motor.
Really heavy decoupled cast iron platter!
With my mods it operates at one gram.
Long ago the massive clunky original arm replaced by Pritchard rosewood arm I happened to have at the time.
Current cartridge: Garrett Bros P66 "Dynamic Coil" high output moving coil.
For a long time I used a Shure M75ED.
Everyone is highly impressed with the sound of this machine.

That looks very ingenious and a neatly done conversion! However.....

It's certainly way ahead of any old 301!

No, it really isn't. I promise you!