Quote:
Originally Posted by ajs_derby
I had an 86SB with the Synchro-Lab motor. To be honest, I never liked belt-drive turntables. They take too long to get up to speed. The cartridge slide was always unreliable, needing removing and refitting if the machine was left longer than a few days between uses.
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Belt-drive turntables do typically take longer to reach speed than idler-drive because of their looser coupling between motor and platter. This wasn't so much an issue with high-torque, high-speed motors such as that in the Garrards discussed here thus far, and the Pioneer PL-12 types (on all, the belts need to be in good condition), as with low-torque, low-speed motors such as those in the Linn, AR, Dunlop and similar turntables. Those DO take a comparatively long time to reach speed, and even a record cleaning brush will often stall them.
The tonearm on the 990B
was a good one. Garrard would re-run it on later models, in their "parts-bin engineering" style, often seen.
As for the cartridge slides, thousands of Garrard users will agree with you (and so would thousands of Dual users, about the cartridge mounts on their turntables). Garrard finally "cured" some models by using the "SME" type headshell.
In my last post, I typed a wrong word in a sentence, which should have read, "It had the same Garrard-patented weight-on-lever antiskating as the Zero 92; like the Zero 100C and Zero 92,
its tracking weight was adjusted by a weight that slid along the tonearm."
It makes sense this way, instead of nonsense!