While the current German made arms are clearly superior to the American made models they are also quite a bit more expensive and the last Souther model made in the US the tangential SLA-3 pops regularly up on eaby and the usual places at keen prices, it also appears that you can purchase an upgrade kit (or a factory upgrade, this is not clear from the price list) from Clearaudio to convert a SLA3 model to a TQ-I Mk2000 specification. Japanese company Seisin Engineering makes replacements for plastic parts used in SME tonearms, made out of dampened metal alloy. see the current lineup of SME Tonearms for info on later models.
Garrard zero 100 vta adjustment series#
The WE-8000 was as their top of the line arm.Īmerican company that made a linear tracking air bering tonearm called Aviator.īit difficult to talk about discontinued tonearms from this company since apart from the original Series 1 that was made in the late 50's and early/mid 60's you can still get any variant of SME custom built for you by the company, because of how uncommon it's on the market the S1 also commands a higher second hand price than the S2 but it's sonically inferior. The WE-308L & WE308N are fairly common and usually not that expensive used but note that the SX version of that arm usually goes for 2x the price of the L & N versions on the Japanese second hand market. like Japanese tonearms, this page here has the specs for most of the arms that the company made and further info on the 407 arm can be had here. Shreve designed improvements to the SL-8E that involved an improved clutch mechanism and replacing the metal wires with a nylon sting, these were apparently, these were quite popular modifications at the time and the consensus is that they were worthwhile, at the least Shreve modified arm fetch higher prices on the second hand market. The SL-8E is battery driven (was there a straight 8 non "electric" version ?). Introduced in 1968 and one of the first linear tonearms on the market, not a great sales success originally but after the take-over by Harman Kardon slightly improved models such as ST-4, ST-6, ST-7 and SL-8E models sold quite well in the 70's in the USA, however notorious for being difficult to set-up, and maintaining an optimal set-up on one of them can test your patience. Please send any factual corrections, dead links, information and/or links that you feel that should be on this page to the page maintainer or if you have a question that might interest others such as about a specific equipment or brands, leave a message on the Facebook page.