turntable repair

[dajt]

We've had this turntable kicking around our house for ages. It's a fancy linear-tracking model, which means there's a little motor that drives the tonearm across the record as it plays. Unfortunately, said motor was stuck, resulting in it only being able to play the first minute or so of a record. This week I got tired of that state of affairs, and resolved to either make it work or break it beyond all hope of repair so I could throw it out. It took an amazing amount of disassembly before I could get at the motor, and even then I couldn't really get good access to the motor shaft and pulley. But I got enough, and after some poking the motor is unstuck and we have a working turntable again.

Unfortunately, the only way I can use it at the moment is to plug it into my Firewire audio box and pump the output onto my computer, which means I can listen to all the record defects in glorious 24-bit stereo through my headphones.

Oh, and I had to re-install Windows on my laptop, because Firewire audio support is Just Lame at the moment. And my laptop hardware is failing so that the screen goes permanently blank if I install the video drivers. And running Windows means I can't read my mail or web browse or IM. So I felt rather out-of-touch all week.

But now I can listen to my old Be-Bop Deluxe albums that were never released on CD! That's worth a huge amount of hassle to me.