Just as an interesting aside, I prefer both of these tangential tracker decks to the mildly modified (off board PSU, feet, mat) 1210 that I owned for about a year.
Anybody else have any thoughts (with experience) on this ?
Am i completely wrong but I thought the SP10 was the technics mutts nuts, wouldn’t it be better to sell them all and buy a mk2/3?
I think it’s about the looks, novelty and small footprint oh and perhaps the price.
Yep, you would Chris, and I’ve thought about it, except for the fact that I love the plug and play nature of these decks.
Over the many years of this pointless hobby of ours, I have become totally pissed off with the faff of which arm, arm and cart set up, vtf, anti-skate and all that bollocks.
These decks give 95% of the performance with 0% of the grief. They really are virtually plug ‘n’ play
Works for me.
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Not really price Andrew (a good condition SL-10 with MC310 cart isn’t far, at all, off the price of an SP-10 motor unit); for reasons, see above.
Couple of shots of slow progress. First time to try the amps in place and see that they fit.
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Hope the house insurance covers it and the police catch them.
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Wow.
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evil buggers
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In the end I couldn’t resist checking out the BC Acoustique Nigers that Bob ICHM linked to a few days ago. They’re playing in the living room as I write this. They were pretty popular in France when they came out in the mid 90’s, winning a prize in the long-established classical music and hi-fi mag Diapason there, but there’s practically no mention of them at all outside the country. I tried to find out a bit more about them online and Google returned quite a few pages. But literally every single one was written in French. The manufacturer’s website offers an English version of the datasheet. Here it is 
https://www.bc-acoustique.com/en/vintage-en/classic-range/niger-1995-detail.
At first glance they look sensitive - 93dB. But that’s not for 1W in. Instead it’s for 2.83V which would only be 1W if the impedance was 8ohms. In fact it’s nominally 4ohms and I ran a frequency scan yesterday (ohms up the side, kilohertz along the bottom) which shows that between about 120Hz and 400Hz it’s 2.5-3ohms
So they could be more like 89-91dB for 1W depending on the frequency at which the sensitivity was measured. They won’t suit valve amps which don’t have a 4ohm tap on the output transformer. Indeed my first quick-and-dirty check with a pair of Quad IIs was not really a success. They sounded coloured and the bass was all over the place. To be fair some of this was due to the fact that I’d just plonked them down on the living room carpet and hooked them up. They might well have been better with proper positioning. But when I retrieved a Dynakit Stereo70 from the loft (twice the Quads’ power and with a 4ohm output option giving much lower output impedance) things evened up and tightened up nicely and I have to say they’re growing on me. And that’s without any change to the positioning.
I’m not sure about the impedance bulge at 2.5-4kHz. That’s where the crossover between the 17cm midrange and 17mm (super ?) tweeter kicks in. I’m slightly suspicious that the twenty-odd year old capacitors feeding those drivers might not have aged well and the bulge is a consequence. But maybe they’re fine and that’s just what the speaker does ? It would be really nice to find a technical review where they’ve made a few measurements so I could put stuff like that to bed. For now I’m just getting used to them though. They’re quite a big change from the NS1000s
VB
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Bean cans are the solution
You could always try my Croft valve amp, assuming it is now 100%? 
It’s now got the bestest new mains transformer Bob. But the output transformers are still the originals and I don’t think they were optimised for low impedance speakers. Still, I could give it a go …
VB
impressed with the little schiit saga valve/passive pre for past few months , might have a chance to get the schiit freya soon so will report on how it sounds
Have you seen the one on hifi4sale? First one I have seen for quite a while.
New dac/pre, Gato PRD3. My Auralic Vega will probably end up in the study headphone system.
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I have lingering memories of one of those driving Gato monos into my ARTs. I bought the DIA250 instead😩.
The onboard DAC is very good too.
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http://www.the-ear.net/sites/default/files/Concert-Fidelity-DAC040.jpg
My new used Concert Fidelity dac-040bd
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