As you probably know from a previous post (not to mention the numerous "Vintage Audio Porn" posts since then), I've been obsessed with audio equipment since I was a teenager. This is one of those quirky obsessions that only other people who share it seem to understand. Thankfully, I still have a few of those quirky friends in my life with whom I can freely converse with.
So if you're not one of those folks, you might wanna just move on to the pictures of the nekkid men elsewhere on the blog. Just sayin'.
While I have a good grasp of most of the major players in the field (Pioneer, Sansui, etc.) during audio's age of big iron, I pride myself most on my knowledge of the Technics brand and smugly thought I had uncovered and documented every piece of equipment they sold between 1974 and 1981 or so. Imagine my surprise then a few nights ago when I ran across this picture of a turntable whose existence I'd been totally unaware of—but whose seeming absence from the lineup I'd often pondered.
A bit of history… Starting in the mid 1970s, Technics pretty much without fail offered three varieties of any given turntable model they produced (there were specialized one-off models and whatnot, but they're the exception rather than the rule): fully automatic, semi-automatic, and manual. With the fully automatic models you would start a record playing by moving a lever or pressing a button. The tonearm would move over to the edge of the record and slowly lower to start playing. At the end of the record, the arm would raise up, return to its rest, and the machine would either completely shut off or the turntable would stop rotating. With the semi-automatic models, you would have to manually lift the arm and place it at the beginning of the record to start, but at the end it would raise by itself and return to its rest. The fully manual models are self-explanatory: you did it all yourself (and are the type of decks preferred by DJs).
Technics' triad numbering system for the various turntable lines was always linear: 1300, 1400, 1500 or 1600, 1700, 1800 (with the lower numbers of each series always being the fully automatic versions). They branched off on that a bit in later years, but it was consistent prior to that.
For all these years, the one glaring exception to this nomenclature was their "01" series.
The "01" series were strange critters to begin with, and I remember the first time I saw one in a store I had to do a double-take and say, WTF is that? Physically they were based on and closely resembled the 1600/1700/1800 series, obviously having used the same dies to cast the turntable bases, but their electronics and parts of the the tonearms (but not the tonearm mounts) came straight from the 1300Mk2/1400Mk2/1500Mk2. Likewise the turntable platters themselves resembled the Mk2 series with a brushed aluminum rim with the strobe dots on the underside, but the angle of the edge of the platters was identical to the 1600 series. And also like the Mk2 series, the 01s were also quartz-locked (using all but one of the same ICs)—something that the 1600 series was not. But the quartz difference between the 01 and the Mk2 series was that there was no pitch control, meaning that you were tied to an exact 33 or 45 rpm; and rendering them useless for DJ work. This explained in my mind why there was no manual version of these strange beasts, no 1501.
But as I discovered a few nights ago, there was a 1501 produced and sold—although apparently only in Japan. At first I didn't believe it…was this a one-off machine? A custom logo screened on a repainted 1401?
No, it was an actual product. Further Googling presented me not only dozens of photos of these machines in the wild, but also the product brochure.
And now of course I want one. Only because of its rarity.