Month: May 2020

I stumbled across this photo online yesterday and it brought up a lot of very traumatic memories.

But before I get into that, some backstory:

No matter how many times I've gotten burned over the years by my penchant for always wanting the latest tech, I've remained—in our current vocabulary—an early adopter. For as long as I can remember I've always been fascinated and have wanted to own the latest bit of technological whatever.

This wasn't something that just popped up with the arrival of personal computing; it seems to have been wired into my psyche's DNA and has applied to pretty much anything my interest is focused on at any given time.

Before computers became my obsession, there was hi-fi audio gear to fire my imagination and drain my wallet.

Among my early-adopter purchases that was not an immediate abject failure was a Technics SL-1300Mk2 fully automatic turntable. I've been trying to piece together the exact timeline and sequence of events that initially brought one in my possession, but my memories are cloudy and when I thought things happened are making no sense in the timeline. So let's just cut to the chase and say sometime around the end of 1978, with some financial assistance from my parents—who were incredulous that I wanted to spend $500 (approximately $1900 in today's dollars) on a turntable—I became a proud owner of what I—despite knowing what I know now—still consider the epitome of Technics turnable design.

The honeymoon lasted about nine months. One night something went south and the platter started spinning out of control. After taking it to a local shop and being told for the better part of two months the required part (one of the fabulous new IC chips in the deck) was on backorder from Japan "indefinitely," I retrieved the table and contacted Panasonic directly to arrange for repairs. It was something I should've done from the start, because less than a week after receiving it, the table was repaired and was shipped back.

And that's where the picture above comes into play.

My family never got along with the neighbors to our east, an animosity that stemmed from years of our families butting heads over anything street related (think of that one house in the neighborhood—and everyone has one—with perpetually waist-high weeds and rusting cars in the front yard). Their twin sons (about ten years younger than me, as I recall) had a reputation for being the kind of kids you wouldn't want your kids hanging out with, and I think that paints a good enough picture of the dynamic going on here.

Anyhow, when the turntable was shipped back, instead of UPS finding no one home at our place and leaving a tag notifying us that we'd have to schedule a new pickup as was the custom even back then, the driver left it next door with those neighbors.

When my mom arrived home that afternoon, she called me at work. "I think your turntable was damaged in shipment. The box is pretty beat up."

I tried to tell myself that these things were packed like tanks and designed to survive the mishandling of any carrier, but once I got home and saw the condition of the box—before even opening it—I knew The Precious had been destroyed. And while it was never proven otherwise, UPS swore it was delivered in perfect condition, leaving only one—or should I say two—culprits; the unsupervised pre-teen hellions next door. This was not shipping damage. The box had been stomped on and thrown across the room.

Its condition wasn't quite as bad as the photo above, but it was close. And it was bad enough that my heart sank when I saw the extent of the damage. While the top deck and platter weren't shattered, the tonearm looked pretty much like the picture and  very little else was still in one piece. The dust cover was destroyed. The bottom cover was split in multiple pieces to such an extent that it stripped components from the internal circuit boards.

We documented everything with photos and filed a claim with UPS, while simultaneously contacting Panasonic. As I recall, UPS denied the claim, but Panasonic asked that the unit be returned to them and they graciously either performed major surgery on what could be salvaged, or more likely simply replaced it with a refurbished unit from stock.

It was nice to have the turntable back (this time we had it delivered to my mom's place of business), but it just wasn't the same. It just felt off. I eventually sold it at a loss and replaced it with a 1700Mk2, semi-automatic table from the next generation (because, of course, the 1300Mk2s were no longer being sold). The 1700Mk2—a very nice table in and of itself—lacked the digital readout and the precision pitch adjustment of its predecessors so it never fired my imagination the way the 1300 did. On the plus side, I had no issues with it whatsoever for the eight years I owned it. For the uninitiated, the 1700Mk2 is basically a home version of the long revered 1200Mk2 (the model in the picture above) that had yet to gain the recognition it rightfully earned among DJs in subsequent years as "the wheel of steel."

Early life lesson learned: don't fall in love with things.

It wasn't until the late 90s when I started rebuilding the vinyl collection that I had purged in the 80s that I discovered a 1300Mk2 could be had via the used equipment market, and the rest is history. Age had not been kind to the majority of the tables, as over the years they all succumbed to a design defect in the arm return mechanism that caused it to stop functioning unless extensive repairs were completed. (I don't blame the Panasonic engineers; I'm sure none of them anticipated that their designs would still be in use 20-30 years after they initially came out.) Thankfully I had those repairs performed the 1300Mk2 I bought, and I fully expect it to outlive me at this point.