The Mike New Technics Bearing

[MartinT]

You'd be *far* better off spending £1800 on a PS Audio Powerplant Premier and £200 on a mains cable, trust me on this. Its effect isn't at all subtle as it isolates equipment completely from the quality of the mains.

[swampy]

Or what about audio mains cables from these guys, only £8 for 0.5m for the cheapest one they make although they make some other better ones for about £30. I've made my own cables in the past, both rca and mains. This one is not much more than cost of making your own mains lead.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...=STRK:MEWAX:IT

A nicely made lead for £30
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...=STRK:MEWAX:IT

I've made my own RCA leads from gold wire in the past bought off Scientific wire co for the tiny sum of £10 at the time !! Add some cotton or teflon tubing and nice locking RCA plugs and you can have a super lead with low L and C for around £30.

Only thing maybe a bit cheap about these budget leads is the screen being galvanised steel rather than thinned copper which is more flexible.

[MartinT]

Gold is not a good conductor; silver is far better. I don't know about the e-Bay cables, personally I'll only recommend what I've heard and for me Kimber is the best. Not cheap, but not £2000 either.

[Alex_UK]

I use a Silver & Gold from Audio Friendly on my Creek amp, and all sounds fine to me, though I think I got lambasted for it here because the woven cable is crap? Can't remember exactly...

[DSJR]

Oh for goodness sake Alex, get some Mark Grants. I'm sure you can afford them and you know it makes sense

[swampy]

Yes I know gold is worse than copper, it was an experiment at the time. I made my next leads out of gold plated silver, pure silver and the last out of copper, all solid core with a single core return wire and no screen. Thats the great thing about a bit of diy, you can try different things at low cost. They all sound different and the lower resistivity of gold is less of an effect when compared to L and C in a cable, as a result of the construction, usually the screen. Low C seems to make the biggest improvement which is why Nordorst make cables like the Red Dawn. However a screen become important on longer runs and from the pre to power amp.

David

[swampy]

I use a Silver & Gold from Audio Friendly on my Creek amp, and all sounds fine to me, though I think I got lambasted for it here because the woven cable is crap? Can't remember exactly...

Are the main 3 conductors woven / braided ? They do not mention that in the ad. They look OK to me. A friend of mine used to manage the test dept at RADex in skem Lancs before they shut down and transferred production to Europe. I got a bit of inside knowledge on the audio cables they supplied to certain audio manufacturers. Most were not custom orders and designs (that costs too much I guess) but standard off the shelf products that can be quickly made without re-design, re-tooling and complex testing. They just added the appropriate name on the sheath in the batch run then batch test.

So I don't doubt some of these leads like the Belden mains cable is used in many other makes.

[Alex_UK]

Oh for goodness sake Alex, get some Mark Grants. I'm sure you can afford them and you know it makes sense

It's on the cards Dave! I'm a sucker for a nice cable, but £2,000? We've been here before, Kris sums up my opinion on the matter!

[DSJR]

The dealer margins on cables are incredibly high and the £2000 mains cable I referred to is imported by Ab Sounds - say no more....

Back to the bearing PLEASE?????

[theophile]

Marco,
What we are seeing now'a'days,is a rediscovery of lessons which were learned in Japan 20 years ago,but which withered on the vine due to the combination of a marketing force in the West which was biased against direct drive,and the CD revolution.

I present the Yamaha GT 2000x as proof:

Yamaha had already had phenomenal success with the GT 2000.It sold very well in Japan(and the Far East).A few years later they devised to update the turntable(in conjunction with the manufacturers and co-designers Micro Seiki).The only substantial changes to the turntable itself(forget the arm for the moment)with the introduction of the 2000x was the bearing which was uprated(all I can say is that the size and diameter were larger)and the plinth was made slightly more substantial.

What speaks volumes about the GT 2000x as compared to the 2000 is that the 2000x sells in Japan today for 3 times what the GT 2000 does on the second hand market.Whatever the bearing-mod brought to the party,people are(and have been for years now)voting with their wallets to have a piece of it.

It's kind of a shame that the Direct Drive Drive sputtered and fizzled-out around that time.I'd imagine that a lot of good developments were probably blueprinted and prototyped,only to be scrapped or shelved when the maintenance of an unprofitable figurehead product was seen to be untenable.

The bright light is the small vanguard of experienced listeners with decades of exposure to a vast array of different systems and components who are prepared to say:

"Yes.These turntables sound good with no concessions needing to be made to other turntable types.They can be competitive in and above their price range."

Along with the greater acceptance of quality Direct Drive as cutting edge comes the market impetus that rewards innovators with sales because the critical mass of sales numbers can allow these enterprises to be sustained and further development can unfold.That's good for all of us.It'll be interesting to see just how good Direct Drive can get,in the next few years.