Since I've got the day off, I thought I'd honor a veteran from a different era.
Earlier at a Superbowl party over at Bryan's (bpape) house, I took advantage of him while he was slightly less coherent than he should have been
He'd been telling me that he had a Acoustic Research ES-1 tucked away that hadn't been played in the best part of a decade. So me being the gear whore that I am blurted out I'll buy it! And buy it I did. It has been sitting for longer than it should have but I'd made it right today. When I first picked up the table from Bryan I grabbed a new belt from Rome at LP Gear.
Today I finally got around to setting her up. I cleaned the bearing, installed the belt and got her set up on my TNT-Audio Sandblaster.
Here she is, the venerable AR-ES-1 with a Grace 707 tone arm and a fully functional Grace F9e cartridge.
After doing a quick cartridge alignment, leveling and setting the VTA and dialing in the tracking weight and anti-skate, I sent her on her maiden voyage with some of Mark Knopfler's Shangri La.
....and here she sits next to my Opera LP5
Well, her sound is surprisingly good. With the Grace cart and arm the surface noise is quite reasonable. Now I have to say I'm cheating with the sound
big time because I'm using the most excellent Graham Slee Reflex Era Gold phono stage but this old Grace F9e cart is doing a darned fine job at detail retrieval. There is bass-a-plenty and a lovely midbass bloom that doesn't intrude on the midrange detail. The highs are quite nice too.
All in all, loads of fun...and set up like she is, doesn't embarrass herself at all compared to my Opera. I think the AR may become a permanent fixture in the system.
....and now to truly honor the real
veterans from my family.
