Thoughts on moving from a 1200G to Sota Saphire or above

Keep the Technics, spend your money on mats, isolation, cartridges, more records  :)

The FR tonearms even also have counterweights placed so that the center of mass is at the LP surface, a good idea

No they don't, not on the FR64S.

I doubt that any modern tonearms have pivot bearings as low in friction as those used in the Technics EPA100 or B500. 

Actually the Naim Aro is lower as tested by Martin Colloms.
And of course there are better bearings available now - on the Technics EPA100's,  replacement of the orginal bearngs with silicone nitride yields improvement.

I wouldn’t even touch the RUBY BALL bearings on Technics EPA-100, especially on EPA-100 mkII. There are people who are always ready "to sell you an improvement", someone in his garage pretending to have better knowledge than Matsushita Japan. The EPA-100 mkII was the best Technics tonearm in the ’80s and still one of the best tonearms ever made!

@chakster

I wouldn’t even touch the RUBY BALL bearings on Technics EPA-100, especially on EPA-100 mkII. There are people who are always ready "to sell you an improvement", someone in his garage pretending to have better knowledge than Matsushita Japan.

So you think JCarr, the designer of Lyra cartridges operates from a garage and pretends to have better knowledge than Matsushita Japan in 1980.

JCarr - Audiogon post dated 10-13-2013

(caveat - my EPA-100 has been completely rebuilt with ceramic ball-bearings rather than the original rubies, and rewired with flying-lead signal outputs instead of the original 5-pin connector).

Perhaps you should do some research before posting ill informed comments on audiogon. And before you put your other foot in your mouth again - silicon nitride is a ceramic.

Dover, thank you for setting the record straight. So do you agree with Mijostyn that vintage tonearms are trash (paraphrasing his actual words which can be found in quotes above.) What I’d read about the EPA100 was that the ruby bearjngs are superb but fragile and thus in some cases have not stood the test of time. Certainly it’s a good idea to replace worn or damaged bearings. Come and see my FR64S some time; to my eye the center of mass of the CW is very near or in the plane of the LP surface.  I might have qualified my original remark about the FR64S CW by noting that if you use the CW to set VTF, or a combination of the CW and the spring balancer, rather than the spring balancer alone, the CW then might end up a few mm off the plane of the LP surface, give or take.  Cartridge weight would also figure into that.