I'm cross posting this from Head-Fi because I am just too tuckered out to write another post. In short, the Sota turntable has arrived just in case anyone is interested.
A little over a year ago I decided to climb back into vinyl after about a 22 year absence.
When I was shopping for an analog setup I was very taken with the Sota designs. Head-Fi member mulveling had a thread with some absolutely stunning pictures of his glorious Series II Sota Star Sapphire that was finished in Koa wood and sported a Fidelity Research FR-64fx tonearm. It was a magnificent piece of work and whenever I had a craving to drool over Sota turntables I always referred to his thread. Sadly, all of those pictures are gone now.
At that time, I started scouring Audiogon and the for sale postings here and on Vinyl Asylum for a used Sota. A new Star Sapphire runs about $3,500 and I just couldn't see myself spending that kind of money on a turntable, and then would still be faced with buying a new tonearm for it. That would have easily put the price at something just shy of $5K for an analog setup, after throwing in a phono preamp. But I wasn't having a lot of success in my search for a used Sota, and the ones I did find were clearly beat to death. So I started looking for a used turntable, with a tonearm and a cartridge for about $2,500 or less. After a short while I found a Rega P7 on Audiogon, which included a low hour Benz Micro Glider H2 MC cartridge. I was able to snag that entire setup for $1,600.
I know that Regas are not especially well regarded here. But I thought it was a good deal and figured that if these turntables were just gawd awful then Rega as a company probably wouldn't be in business. And regardless how shunned Rega turntables might be here at head-fi, they consistently get excellent reviews, so Rega must be doing something right (besides buying advertising space in the hi-fi rags that said reviews appear in from time to time
).
Truth be told, I was very happy with the Rega P7 for the year or so that I owned it, and it provided me with hundreds of hours of listening pleasure. Though I will admit that when I first took the turntable out of the box I was hard pressed to find $2,695 (retail) worth of engineering and design in that deck. The turntable is spartan by any definition. When you take the ceramic platter off of the Rega P7, what is left (the plinth, the motor, and the dust cover) probably doesn't weigh much more than 10 pounds. The platter weighs about 15 pounds. So it wasn't the most stable of platforms. But all of that aside, the Rega was capable of making some terrific music and I cannot fault it at all from that perspective.
The opportunity to grab a nice Sota Star Sapphire emerged about 10 days ago. I found a great looking specimen on Audiogon, at a time when I wasn't really looking for one, from a seller with a great feedback profile. It was a Series II and looked to be in really nice shape. The asking price for the deck was $1,399, and the seller had a SME 3009 tonearm and Sota Reflex Record Clamp that he offered to me for an additional $450. The tonearm did not have the original SME head shell, but I found one on my own from another source. Suffice it to say that I jumped at the chance and emailed the seller asking for a contact phone number. We quickly closed the deal for the whole shebang and I put my Rega P7 up for sale. I priced it to sell and took the Benz Micro Glider cart off since I was planning to mount it to the SME 3009 tonearm on the Sota. My Rega P7 was sold in less than an hour, I was paid 30 minutes later, and I shipped it out to the new owner the following morning.
The Sota Star Sapphire turntable arrived via UPS today. And it didn't come a moment too soon. This has literally been a week from hell for me. A incredibly stress-filled week at work where very little seemed to go right and some unexpected (though not very serious) health-related issues cropped up. I really needed something to lift my sagging spirits, which happened when a big truck with the letters UPS emblazoned on its sides pulled into my driveway.
Here is what the driver carried up to my door:
I really love this turntable. It looks better sitting on my audio rack than it does in these pictures. This turntable is massive, tipping the scales at about 60 pounds. The vacuum platter works exactly as advertised. I took out a slightly warped record, placed it on the platter and powered up the deck. I could hear the slight whir of the vacuum motor and in about 3 seconds the record was as flat as pancake on the platter. This is a very nice feature.
I asked memepool for advice about the SME 3009 tonearm and he convinced me to get it. The price was pretty compelling as a package deal anyway since a Sota Reflex Record Clamp is about $250 new from Sota. I found the SME 3009 tonearm to be pretty easy to setup, but I also had some help from the seller. I was adjusting the rider weight when all of a sudden a small white piece of plastic and a small spring fell out of a hole in the rider weight. I couldn't figure out how to get it put back together. Thankfully the seller provided some terrific after-the-sale support and got me back on my feet in no time. Once the weight was remounted, I put the head shell on, checked alignment with a protractor, and then set the VTA, tracking weight, and bias. Shortly thereafter I was listening to my copy of Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood and I was back into a state of equilibrium and audio nirvana.
Sitting on the floor outside my home office is a box of 140 vinyl records that I bought for $30, and the seller assured me that none of them will grade any lower than VG+. I went through about 30 records just visually inspecting them and most of them looked very nice, and there are many really great titles: several RCA living stereo first pressings and a number of Columbia Six Eye jazz records. Some Lionel Hampton, a few Nat King Cole records, but mostly classical music on the Deutsche Grammophon and RCA Victor labels. I am listening to Pop Concert Favorites on the the RCA Living Stereo/RCA Camden label. The jacket is a bit worn but the record sounds like it has never even been on a turntable. And the sound is truly breathtaking.
To me this is what vinyl is really all about. That is a lesson I learned from Bigshot. Forget about those overpriced 200g pressings that have more defects than music. The real treasure is buying a bulk lot of records and finding wonderful stuff that looks virtually unplayed...and realizing that this excellent music only set you back about about a buck or two (or even less). When you factor in the shipping costs, that box of 140 LPs had a per-record cost of just 74 cents! Given that, I don't think there is anything that could possibly motivate me to buy another "audiophile" vinyl pressing for between $30 and $50. There is just too much great music out there to be had for very little money, and it isn't hard to find.
--Jerome
