So what do you do while watching the super bowl? Well rewire your SME 3009/IIi of course.
I had been reading about the improvements that could be made to this venerable arm by eliminating the yucko SME 4-pin connector and wiring straight from the phono cart to the plugs on the phono stage.
I bought 3 ft. of Discovery tonearm wire and two Cardas GRCM RCA connectors from TakeFive Audio. I also bought some gold plated female serial port pins from Fry's.
Over time I had read rewiring the SME varied from a piece of cake to something that should not be undertaken by mere mortals. Being foolish, I decided to try my mid-level skills at this task.
So the first thing I did, was remove the pin connector at the bottom of the arm. Hmm. Those SME wires are really tiny and brittle too. I removed the headshell and did not see the knot in the wires and broke the originals. No big deal since I had the discovery wires, but not part of the original plan. I then removed the arm from the bearing and unscrewed the counterweight assembly. I then made a mistake that I would not realize until reassebly. I unscrewed the knife bearing from the arm - I turns out that the screw for this holds in the ground wire for the arm tube. More about this later.
The old wires slid out without a problem and then I inspected the arm. There was no balsa wood or filling that other people mentioned. It's just a chromed thin walled tube with a bend in it.
I taped the end of the Discovery wire and threaded it from the bottom of the arm out to the tube. I had to lift the arm off the bearing seat to thread it through the arm - the ground wire was a little in the way. During the course of this, I broke the ground wire, so I used one of the other wires (blue) from the SME bundle to rewire that too. Soldering was easier than I expected - I used a 3rd hand and magnifier to do it. The really hard part was screwing the knife bearing onto the arm again.
This took more dexterity than 2 hands could easily provide. One has to hold a tiny ground tab steady while putting the bearing over it blindly and then screwing it in with a tiny screw. That took me about 45 minutes I think.
Once that was complete, the soldering of the pins to the wire was easy - I carefully stripped the wires using a razor blade and cut at an angle into my thumb nail - worked better than it sounds.
The soldering of the RCAs and reattachment of the counterweight was simple and I got everything back together pretty quickly, though too late to do much listening.
A quick listen this morning reveals some better detail, but I think it will take a little time to burn in. I noticed that the Discovery wire reduced the anti-skate adjustment that I liked the clean path direct to the phono stage. I will report on this more after I do some mods to the TT next.
I just thought people would be interested in hearing about the process.
-MA
