There were a couple of what looked like tobacco tins, painted black with a pair of tin cans sticking through the lid. I had no idea what they were… It turned out they were Jurgen Schou step-up transformers for the Ortofon SPU pick-ups. They were literally built into tobacco tins, plenty of solder, no messing. But I’m not really a vintage guy, at that time I wasn’t buying many records, I certainly wasn’t going to run an SPU at close to 4g – so I stuck them on eBay: the first pair went for £950! That piqued my interest and I decided I wanted to get the 301s running. I made a plywood plinth for one of them, stuck one of the SME 3009/II arms and a cartridge on it and wow! Straightaway, as soon as I heard it, I realised that this was a much, much better turntable than I’d anticipated. It really jammed. You could put anything on and it was just fun. – really, really enjoyable. So then I wondered what would happen if I put my Ekos on it. It was just a different level.
So I decided to hang onto the decks. They’d been just up the road since 1963, they were a bit of history and I loved them: not so much the SME arms, but I didn’t want to drop real money on alternatives. I built two plinths but, for about 10-years they just sat there without tonearms on them. But then lockdown happened and suddenly I had no prospect of work. I was an event photographer and no events literally meant no work. I knew I was going to be stuck at home for at least a few weeks, and there was lots of stuff I ought to be doing – repairing the roof, a bit of painting and decorating, plumbing, central heating that doesn’t work – all of which my wife was keen for me to get on with. So I needed something to serve as a distraction from that. So I decided to get the Garrards going. Which arms would I put on by choice? Probably the Kuzma 4POINT, but the bill for that would be the wrong side of £10K and I didn’t have that sort of cash to drop on this project. So I thought to myself, “Here’s the moment: I’m going to make the best tonearm in the world.” I didn’t actually think I’d succeed but why not at least have a go?
I had a Black&Decker Workmate, a hand drill and basic tools. How hard could it be? Anyway, I decided to give it some thought. Because of my slightly nerdy interest in mechanics, I had a reasonable understanding of most of the tonearms that are out there, including things like the Schröder with its string and magnet bearing. I knew how they worked but also which ones I thought were good – at least from a mechanical design (as opposed to listening) point of view. One thing that definitely informed me was that I’d had (and still have) a Well Tempered Tonearm and there were some very good and interesting things about that…
RG – I always thought that the Well Tempered was an astonishing piece of lateral thinking: genuinely, elegant. In every way apart from that f***ing bath of silicon fluid…
