It’s probably time for a swift aside. I can imagine that, just like me, you might be thinking, “Hmmm – I wonder what would happen if I dropped this motor into a much better plinth and mounted a ‘proper’ tonearm?” Believe me, it’s not that simple. The CS 20 dates from those days long before SMT and ICs. Open it up and inside you’ll find four(!) of those medium-sized brown circuit boards so reminiscent of early Japanese electronics, packed with discrete components and hooked up with a veritable spider’s nest of point-to-point wiring, connecting them to each other and the buttons spread all along the front panel. So, unlike the Denon DD motor units with their potted motor and control circuits neatly encapsulated below the platter and controls arranged around it, migrating the Teklefunken’s mechanical and electrical innards to a more stately home would be far from simple. If that’s your ultimate goal, then one of the Denon units is probably a better and far simpler proposition, albeit one that’s rather more expensive, ‘cos this isn’t that. The real beauty of the CS 20 is the neat, complete solution that it delivers, straight out of the box or after a little careful tweaking.
Push-button paradise…
After all the fussing and fiddling, how did the CS 20 work? Operationally, reverting to an automatic tonearm is both a bit of a culture shock and a welcome novelty. The arm operated flawlessly and if the cueing is a bit ‘sudden’ then it is also spot on accurate. The speed switching is as trouble free as you’d expect and the speed stability stays rock solid – again, exactly as you’d expect. After the initial novelty and with either of the Lyra cartridges installed (the counterweight sleeves allowed me to have a weight set exactly for each cartridge, which made swapping out headshell/cartridge combinations incredibly simple) it was time for some serious listening. I’d opted to use the CH Precision P1 phono-stage, as it allowed me to listen to all of the different cartridges as well as connecting both the Telefunken and an alternative deck simultaneously, in this case the VPI Classic 4 with its separate power supply and the JMW 3D12 tonearm carrying an Etna Lambda. Clearly the cartridges aren’t identical and in fact, using the P1, the SL will give the Telefunken a slight advantage, but hey – give the underdog a chance!
Most of the listening involved running the CS 20 in isolation, the direct comparisons being a fairly minor part of the process as, once the essential nature of the Telefunken was established, comparison simply served to underline it. Right from the start, the CS 20 produced focus, stability and a sense of musical purpose. The Denon DL-103 might have been a little rounded and murky, but it certainly didn’t lack energy or a sense of musical momentum: Improving the cartridge only served to build on that dynamic and temporal foundation, adding body to instruments, space between them and increasing dynamic range and attack. By the time the Etna Lambda SL was in play, the performance was at a level that made the VPI comparison perfectly valid – despite the massive disparity in price and close to 40-year age gap.
