make your own g88

[SteveTheShadow]

Well, this deck has gone to a new home straight away again, guess I'll have to make another one
My supply of donor lencos is rapidly running out....

Yep, it was me. I bought it. I just couldn’t part with the thing. The combination of well fettled idler motor unit, the superb finish on the plinth and the icing on the cake; the SME Series II tonearm was too good to let go. I’ve not enjoyed vinyl this much in decades. It’s as if the Flat Earth never happened.

[Vinyl-ant]

Your 59 plinth is about twice the depth of the ones I did iirc, there are a few ways and means of dealing with the motor noise.
Your 59 is one way, the sledgehammer approach, I. E make it very heavy. the other is what I did with these 2 which is to decouple the bits you don't want the noise getting into, and sink the noise out of the bit it's in. Paul's big plinth 'grand lady' is a mix of the 2.The way the deck is mounted in to the plinth is also important.

The motor noise is initially controlled to a degree by the mounting springs, but not all of it. Some degree will get past the springs, up the studs and into the chassis plate. This noise will then be transferred into the bearing, idler and arm. This is the infamous idler rumble
The heavy platter then deals with some of this in the bearing, and the mat deals with some as well. It actually deals with this pretty well. The idler also deals with some because the drive surface is rubber.
The noise is transferred out of the chassis plate into the plinth where it contacts around the edge of the pressing. It then travels via the top layer of the plinth into the arm post, up the arm and affects the cart. This is if it is all solidly mounted.
I decoupled the arm board on silicone grommets which stops it getting into the arm. The arm board is nearly 30mm deep on this one so even if it wasn't decoupled there would be no direct path from the chassis to the arm, it has to go through at least 30mm of the plinth to get into the underside of the arm board, then up through the arm board and into the arm. In this case the silicone grommets stop that
Breaking that path is the bit to look at.
Also look at how the noise gets out of the chassis. It has 2 ways, via the chassis plate and via the mounting studs.
With this one and Paul's, the studs are isolated too with oversized holes through the plinth so the studs don't touch it, and rubber washers between the plinth and the nuts where it does, so it decouples the mountings. Which means only one noise path to deal with.
The noise is contained in the plinth and can't get to the arm, the plinth layers can then deal with the motor noise. Solid feet (on Paul's) then couple the plinth to whatever it is stood on to sink it as much as possible away into the rack or whatever.
This one has hard rubber feet, so is a halfway house, it will sink certain frequencies which aren't blocked by the hard rubber, but it wont sink others, but it gives a degree of decoupling from the rack its on, making it abit less sensitive to what it sits on.

There is no one way to skin a cat, both ways are valid, if someone can accommodate a plinth that could serve as an anchor for the qe2, that works just fine, if they can't, there are other ways

[SteveTheShadow]

Been doing a bit of research on the SME 3009 S2 for a laugh. Some people think it was one of the best pickup arms ever manufactured whilst others think it was an overpriced piece of crap. I’m in the former camp, but under no illusions that it is now definitely of its time. It was a great arm 40 years ago when I bought my first one, and is still a great platform for modern MMs. Just don’t expect to track your Lyra Atlas in it, or you’ll soon be on the internet, writing about floppy perforated headshells, soft treble, awful nylon knife edge bearings, rubber baseplate decoupling grommets and crap bass

[SteveTheShadow]

Well today I did something that could have turned into a disaster and left me with no vinyl playback. Let’s just say, the potential for a major feck up was never far from my mind throughout the process, so I proceeded with great care, checking and double checking at every step.

I’ve been pleased with the Phono 1 I bought from Richard a couple of years ago, so I couldn’t leave it at that, oh no!
I cracked open the case, removed the mains switch, mains cable, transformer, rectifier and caps, leaving just the regulator board and the phono board itself inside the NVA case.

In a Maplin plastic clamshell project case, I fitted the 300VA, 30V toroidal transformer, I had once used in the power amp, the rectifier and 13600uF of capacitance per rail. DC out was courtesy of a 3 pin female XLR socket, carrying +45V, -45V and 0V.
At the phono end, a cable entered where the original AC power cable had been and fed the positive and negative regulator inputs, the existing 0V busbar and the indicator LED. The free end of this cable was terminated in a male XLR plug, which connected to the DC power outlet on the Maplin box. Fired it all up and it worked, which was a start. It was all built to Class II construction

Connected turntable, fired up the now two-box phono stage and lowered the pickup onto a record. I don’t know what to say; this is another level of vinyl replay altogether - one that I’ve never before experienced. What did the Doc say? “Power supplies, power supplies, power supplies”

[Daniel Quinn]

Excellent, it's an unbelievable transformation.

[SteveTheShadow]

Excellent, it's an unbelievable transformation.

It certainly is. I saw your comments on your own mods to your Phono1 and thought I’d have a go myself.

[Latteman]

Interesting inspiring

[Latteman]

Next project for you is to make a mm/mc switch

[SteveTheShadow]

Here is the stupidly over engineered power supply for the Phono 1:

109C59CF-114C-41BD-B0BD-132030DF4642.jpeg (129.36 KiB) Viewed 2534 times

Large mains toroid is bolted to a piece of acrylic plate, so that the mounting bolt head remains inside the enclosure.

And how it looks with the lid on:

F1501D86-140A-4195-AFAA-9FFC763268C1.jpeg (57.6 KiB) Viewed 2534 times

[Latteman]

Nice
What are the brown things- & their purpose

Ps- transformer ordered