Pah, big girl’s turntable.
Circa 1980
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Is that a fidelity research arm?
Looks it.
Could be. It was designed in Japan. It looks pretty advanced for 1980 and was the forerunner to the Micro Seiki.
The Melco was a spectacular sounding deck. I recall hearing one in Stockholm many years ago, deeply impressive.
In the late 70’s a Japanese guy Be Yamamura (who also ran a Sushi restaurant in Soho) was importing them usually fitted with FR arms, along with Kondo’s AudioNote cartridges & earliest amplifiers. He was putting together systems that were way more ambitious (& expensive) than anything anyone else was doing. They’d do presentations at London hotels and would shock the journalists & enthusiasts of the time who were otherwise used to a diet of Linn & Naim as being the ultimate in high end gear.
A bit about Melco here. Funnily enough the same company who recently returned with their range of streamers.
Yamamura stayed in the UK til the mid/late 80’s, custom building fairly extreme equipment & systems for people but eventually moved to Italy & still does it there.
http://zero-distortion.org/yamamura-horns/
Would love to find one of the Air 211 amps he was making in the early 80’s. Lovely sounding things. Most went to Denmark I think. PQ used to get them from him & sell them there.
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The Melcos look well ahead of their time. You can see how they’ve spawned a thousand imitators.
I suppose comparison with Micro Seiki is inevitable. Was there any connection or just rivals doing similar things?
Have you listened to those horns Guy? The relative compactness is appealing.
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I think Micro Seiki’s serious turntables came along just afterwards although they’d been operating as an engineering company since 1961.
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Love to hear those horns!
They make my Oris 150s look tiny
Needs tapped horns
I’m sure I’ve been at a show where there were some but I can’t recall hearing them. For a while Yamamura was in cahoots with some minor nobility (member of the Churchill family) and was trading out of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire and I think they were making & selling a version of these speakers from there.
I was contacted by someone 3 or 4 years ago who was trying to write a biography of Yamamura & seek out some of his more ‘out there’ creations. I was also sent pictures by Peter from Deco of some bits that a Be customer was chopping into the shop. A mad looking unipivot arm with ceramic tube, a Melco a-like heavyweight turntable he’d made and some fairly extreme speaker components. I may still have the pics somewhere. I’ll have a look. Yamamura turned up at Munich in 2016 if memory serves with some very large horns on static display using the larger Ale compression drivers.
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It’s airways struck me as odd to have the thin part of the horn going through the wider part - surely an offset or very slight twist would make building and machining so much easier! Was it for structural integrity, or sound, do we think?
One of Be’s bespoke TT’s. I think this one had an air bearing. Note the very long ceramic armtubed unipivot.
Another one (this time with a Graham).
If thats a 12" LP it’s a substantial platter.
Remnants of the unipivot end of the ceramic arm as inherited by Deco.
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Bloody hell, the arm in that first pic looks mental
Speaking of air bearings, done any more with yours?
jesus that’s hideous.
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