Going vintage part II: The arrival

Now I was in the posession of a vintage Dual 1219 turntable and I did not even  know if it worked or not. The seller claimed it was in working, still pretty fishy considering the low price. Since I was not able to get the turntable myself it was not possible to test it in advance. Considering how little I paid for it, it was well worth the risk. On first inspection the turntable seemed in okay condition. No dents on the body, a working, though not original dust cover, a body mod to fit the dust cover and surprisingly two din cables to attach to the amplifier. To finally be able to listen to my records on this beauty I needed a couple of things: test the turntable, buy an amp and some din to cinch adapters.

When I plugged the power cord into the outlet and switched the turntable on I could hear the motor working but the platter did not move. Coincidently, I had read about this issue a week ago on the dual board. To fix this, I had to remove the platter. There are a lot of instructions to be found online on how to do these things. Fortunatley, I only had to clean the idler and roughen up the edges a little bit to make it work. Furthermore, the speed control was stuck. Trying to force it to move may actually damage the turntable even though it's built like a tank. I had to remove the turntable from the body to be able to access the inner mechanics. Removing the resinified oil and applying some lubricant fixed the issue instantly. The armilft was non-functional. Fixing this would be possible but had no priority. The automatic was working horizontally but due to the broken armlift not vertically. So I had to operate the turntable manually. I removed the cartridge and the needle to clean the contacts and tried to remove as much resin as possible from the inner mechanics. This would allow me to at least test this beauty, but I still needed an amp.

I found a used Denon PMR-925 amplifier from a local seller for 70 bucks. I did not do much research on other models, it was cheap, has a phono input, was in good condition and had favorable reviews. All I had to do was to buy the din to cinch adapters. Since there are two din cables attached to the turntable I bought to. And in the end it was the right choice, Went to my local electronics store to buy the din to cinch adapters to be ready to go. With everything attached, I put on a random record and there it was... a muffled sound... no bass even with the bass turned to max. So back to the internet I was, looking for information on this issue. If you want to call me an idiot - please do so. Seems I only forgot to attach the grounding to the amp. As soon as I did I got blown away.

The difference between my old stereo and this turntable plus amp was huge. Even with the same lousy speakers I was able to get much better sound. And surprisingly, even on low volume it still sounded great in stereo. I decided to attach my old tweeters as well. On the denon amp you are able to turn on/off the speaker pairs seperately. On some records it was great enhancement and on some the quality suffered. Still... I was as happy as I could be. I decided to test the Dual 1219 for a month or two before deciding if I wanted to repair (or in this case: let repair) the turntable.

Thanks to www.vinylengine.com and www.dual-board.de I was able to get the Dual 1219 to working conditions. So If you don't know these websites - go check them out.

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Up next:
A review of Bloody Hammer's - Under the Satan's Sun including some hopefully pleasant changes to how I conduct my highly subjective reviews.