Building high-end 'tables cheap at Home Despot II

Oops, thanks Mike for the research, I leave it to you to source the various elements and get back to us with the results ;-)!! I've taken the first steps in having new teflon thrust-plates made too. Now to treat my "Ultra Lenco" and see which incredible place it takes me: Why don't you come with me, little girl, on a Magic Carper Ride!!!!

Just a quick note on the use of Stillpoints with the Lenco. I've kept the bolt feet on, but they sit on a layered base of maple and acrylic with large size Stillpoints under the base just below where the bolt feet rest on top. Adding the Stillpoints definitely improves detail retrieval, and does it in a way that sounds smooth and full. Putting Aurios under the base also improves detail retrieval, and makes for a brighter sound. Brass cones sound more like the Aurios. Which is best is depends on whether you want to go 'richer' or 'brighter,' but it's an improvement either way.

Jean,
Thanks for holding the Lenco flag so high and proud.
I am in total agreement, the Lenco should be left as it is- with regards to its integral parts; motor, base plate, idler wheel mechanism, spindle.
Please do replace the plinth using the recipe of baltic birch ply and MDF, and replace the arm with an affordable Rega. Once one gets a feel for what wonderful machines these oldies but goodies truly are, then go to the Lenco laboratory for further experiments and improvements.
Lucky for us, we have the know how at our fingertips-thanks to the Lenco aficionados on this wonderful site.
The Lenco is a KILLER!
Remember- friends don't let friends use belt drives.

Thanks for that Michael, as always your posts are a hoot!! And thanks for the report of the footer experiments Bob, I keep hearing about the use of Stillpoints, I'll have to get around to trying these.

Well, yesterday I staged a BIG round of tonearm/cartridge comparisons, with REALLY good news for those on a budget!! As I've often written, I've been trying to get the RS-A1 to match the Mighty JMW/Ortofon Jubilee combo, so I had acquired a Monster Cable Sigma Genesis 2000 to replace the Denon DL-103"E" (great, but low bass is essentially absent, it's a mid-bass champ, which means it fits into the usual 40 Hz or mini monitor speaker systems perfectly...midrange GORGEOUS) on the RS-A1 which actually took the lead!!...for a while. Then I installed one of the newly-treated main bearings on the Ultra Lenco - with the usual playing overnight at 78 RPM, which makes a BIG difference in getting the new lubricant sunk into the bronze bushings to reduce noise - and the JMW/Ortofon Jubilee (which has absolutely state of the art bass which shames anything else I've heard, and this is a BIG plus on idler-wheel drives as it allows Full Restitution of the LPs) once again took a significant lead. THEN I hooked up the humble re-wired Sonus (a low-mass variant of the Mayware tonearm) with the Satin M-117Z (roughly $400 at eBay prices), and, incredibly, this in overall terms matched the JMW/Ortofon (at roughly $4K new), falling behind in some areas, and surpassing it in others. Surprisingly, it matched and perhaps beat the JMW/Ortofon in the bass!!!

Now the Satin cartridges are truly strange creatures, high-output MCs - which almost always fall far behind low-output MCs in absolute sound quality terms - which have removable styluses. Not only that, but the stylus assembly is held in place by simple magnetism, nothing else. Now this last fact explains why the erstwhile beautiful but flawed Satin only bloomed when matched to the ultra-low-mass Sonus: anything heavier caused relative movement of the stylus assembly because of simple mass/momentum. But with the Sonus, the stylus remains in place and a stunning amount and quality of bass emerged. The Satin was waiting for the Sonus all this time to bloom.

Getting back to the Tale of Rumble, the Sonus/Satin was unplayable at higher volume via the reflex-loaded (ported) Athenas due to the low-frequency feedback loop I had written about back a few posts. But with the three-way Yamaha NS-690s (which belong to the famed NS-1000 line), which are acoustic suspensions speakers (i.e. no port), but actually go deeper in the bass than the Athenas, the Sonus/Satin is playable with no volume limits, no rumble, no feedback loop. Now, reflex loading leads to mushier, less controlled bass (but higher efficiency/sensitivity figures), while acoustic suspension speakers traditionally have tighter, more tuneful bass (but lower efficiency figures as it takes more power to move the drivers). The reflex-loaded Athenas picked up and amplified otherwise inaudible low-frequency noise, which moved the furniture, and cycled it in an escalating feedback loop. So again, reports of idlers and rumble are due not to the idlers themselves (i.e. the rumble is not intrinsic) but is due to the fact that mass-loaded idler-wheel drives have no lower limit in the bass, and so retrieve bass noise, which leads to amplification and low-frequency feedback loops. I point out here that belt-drives do not usually exhibit these problems, for the simple fact they cannot match idler-wheel drives in the bass, period.

Anyway, good news to budget-minded audiophiles/music lovers, you can, given proper matching, achieve state-of-the-art results on a budget!! Satin cartridges are rare as hen's teeth, but if any of you come across some, jump on them! There are likely MMs as well which, on the Sonus, will produce similar results. Ditto other vintage tonearm/cartridge combos. Have fun all!!!

And now for a tale of synergies and Deccas. Waaayyy back, in the days of the original thread, I had accidentally found that the JMW tonearm was a perfect match for the notorious Decca cartridges. For the first time in my experience, the Decca behaved perfectly with no mistracking or jumping out of grooves, at least almost perfectly, with possibly one album in my collection giving it problems.

Back then I had my vintage Sony TAE-5450 preamp (stellar, recently handily outperforming and displacing a heavily-modified Superphon Revelation Basic Dual Mono, itself a legendary '80s phono preamp), evidently an excellent match for the Decca. The POWER, and transient SPEED I heard then was awesome to beholdd, and I declared this the Best Combination in the world (Giant Lenco/JMW/Decca), being at the same time my discovery of the effects of increased mass, the first Giant Lenco I built at the request of Dave Pogue, to whom I owe TWO discoveries (Giant/Mass is Class and the JMW/Decca combination).

Now the Decca cartridges are Direct Scanning designs, meaning there is no suspension, the diamond being attached at one end of a bent piece of metal, the other end going directly to the magnets. This means direct communication of energy/information to the electrical generator (the moving magnets), which in turn means, in engineering terms, that it should (like the idler-wheel drive principle) be superior to the alternatives (standard suspension cartridges, which is everything else). But, the resulting tremendous energy of the Direct Scanning principle means Deccas will only perform up to spec on the appropriate tonearms (otherwise buzzing and mistracking and jumping about), which means fluid damping (I also got great results on a Maplenoll tonearm with damping trough in the Fab '80s). Recently, a Canadian audio magazine declared the "lower" Deccas (including the Super Gold) severely flawed and gave them a thumbs-down because they insisted on disregarding decades of collective Decca experience and using them in standard undamped captive-bearing tonearms.

Anyway, eventually I got an ARC SP8 preamp, which was fabulous, and then an Orotfon Jubilee to replace my extinct Kiseki Purpleheart Sapphire MC, and for the first time, in my system, I heard something which could beat the Decca, the JMW 10.5/Ortofon Jubilee combo. But now, I am back to a Sony preamp, the 2000F with swithcable MC and MM loading and two phono stages. On trying the JMW Decca Super Gold combo once again, I now hear the Decca far outstripping the JMW/Jubilee combo. Yet in another system the same week (Quad ESL 63s driven by tube electronics, and a Graham 2.2 Ceramic on a Giant Lenco) the story was precisely the reverse. Now that Graham/Decca combo sounded absolutely perfect in audio terms, but in my system it is Lighting and Thunder to a far greater degree, along with truly astonishing transparency and detail. Everything sounds so REAL, so palpable, so 3D!

I believe this is due not only to electronics which the Decca loves (vintage Sony), but also to the acoustic suspension Yamaha NS-690s (which I remind everyone belongs to the famed NS-1000 monitor line, haivng in fact deeper bass than the 1000s). I had also written way back in the Kundalini Effect days, that acoustic suspension speakers retrieve more of the Palbability Factor and Timing (PRaT) which is yet another aspect of the superiority of idler-wheel drives over the competition, due to their tighter and more responsive bass (also deeper bass for a given size, but with the penalty of reduced sensitivity).

Anyway, given a good acoustic suspension speaker and sympathetic electronics, the Lenco/JMW/Decca combination is once again at the Top of the Sonic Heap, providing truly unbelievable results, borderline vaporizing the Yamaha drivers!! This is not to say that the results are not stellar in other systems (the Decca handily outperformed a $3K MC in the Giant Lenco/Graham 2.2/tube/Quad '63 system), just that to hear what an idler/Decca can do an acoustic suspension design is way recommended!! This means too push-pull tube electronics, not single-ended (excepting certain particularly muscular single endeds as the Wyetech electronics) to drive these more difficult speakers.

I'll next try out the underrated AR2ax's, now that I have this fabulous Lenco/JMW/Decca combo singing once again!! WHAT fun!! Have fun out there all you idler users as well!! One discovery as well of all these tonearm/cartridge combos, was just how incredible the humble/budget Denon DL-103"E" (roughly $300 all told)sounded on the JMW, both super-smooth and slamming, and transparent as well! All you silent readers out there owe it to your Audio Happiness to get ye out and hear a properly set-up idler-wheel drive, but be prepared, as First Contact is often a severe psychological shock (can vinyl sound like THIS?!?!)! There's a reason the Idler-Wheel Movement is steadily gaining steam and adherents :-).