Matsushita brand, Technics SL-12xx History.

by **gakto2009** on 02 Jan 2009, 21:27

It is not often you get to review an audio component that has its very own page on the wikipedia. Or one that has been around for almost 35 years, one that sold over 3.5 million units in that time, one with a bad reputation as a professional turntable.

The advent of CD caused the Japanese to withdraw almost immediately from the analogue front, which subsequently killed off all further development of the direct-drive species.

One DD turntable survived this massacre. In 1972 Matsushita brand Technics released the SL-1200, a model sitting in the midst of its consumer range, but still at the right side of the quality/value divide. With its rich functionality and relative sturdiness the Ur-1200 got adopted by the DJ-crowd, and later generations of the SL-1200, from the 1979s MkII on, shed some of their domesticality and grew more pro/DJ-oriented. As such they got somewhat separated from Technics' main product line, which put them into a position to be preserved throughout the ages: despite numerous new iterations, the MkII never ceased production.

So we should be grateful to those disco knights of yore. They kept Technics' order books filled. What started as a fairly upmarket example of seventies engineering is now, after all tooling has been written-off at least a hundred times, a marvel of cheap but high-quality mass production: a Technics SL-1200 MkII costs today, with careful shopping, about £325. This is what I paid for my first SL-1200 back in 1995. The SL-1200 outright beat inflation, and that is a small wonder.

Reasons enough for a closer look... yes?

The SL-1200 is based on a heavy plinth, sited on four height-adjustable compliant feet. The plinth has a nice aluminium top, and a rather ugly and utilitarian-looking bottom made from a fairly dead compound. The aesthetically-challenged plinth and the four high feet make this turntable look sligly awkward, something that you'd want to hide in a console (as in studios!) rather than exhibit in public. With the exception of a rather flimsy and insubstantial dust cover the overall impression of quality is decent, which given the low selling price is quite an achievement. The deck is sturdy, very heavy, and confidence-inspiring.

The heart of the SL-1200 is of course the tried and trusted direct drive motor, with its stator bolted to the plinth and its rotor part of the platter. This platter is of thin aluminium, damped with a layer of rubber. Even then it still is rather ringy and really requires the included thick and heavy rubber mat to quiet down. This mat is rather massive, but appeared to be not perfectly flat, causing a wobble of about 0.5 mm.

The drive is controlled with a large start/stop button and a pitch slider with center-detent for nominal speed. A stroboscope light is, distractingly, always on. A nice touch is the hidden stylus light that pops up at the push of a bottom, making cueing in dark rooms a tad easier.

The SL-1200 tonearm has an even worse reputation. I'm not sure why. Yes, it is old-fashioned. Yes it is not a single casting and thus structurally less rigid than often desired. Yes it has an outmoded detachable headshell. But these are all issues that can be sidestepped by a proper choice of cartridge.

The less-dogmatic music lover or record collector will find this arm a charm to work with. The arm's height can be set easily with a large rotating collar that travels over a range of 6 millimeters, and then can be locked in place with a lever. Advocates of the SL-1200 claim that VTA can be set safely while playing a record, access to the collar is partly blocked by various bits and pieces of the arm that you don't want to touch while tracing a rare record, so my advice still is only to set VTA with the arm firmly locked in its rest position.

In use the arm feels remarkably light, this is testament to the SL-1200 having very low bearing friction, perhaps even lower than the MKIV does! The arm's cable is attached and of the standard commercial variety with moulded nickle RCA plugs. The cable loom is configured for a floating cartridge connection, this allows using the arm with balanced-input phonostages such as the AQVOX Phono 2 Ci.

The SL-1200 comes with one headshell and assorted cartridge screws. There is also a screw-on weight for the tonearm to balance heavy cartridges, as well as a metal plate for the headshell to increase the arm's effective mass somewhat. Then there is an overhang alignment gauge that clips over the headshell, but I found this to be too crude to be of any value: perhaps fine for mounting a Stanton 500 in a dark club.

DJing Dynasty

The SL-1200 MkI was entirely replaced by the MkII in 1979, bringing significant improvements to the drive system and the tonearm, while adding features for clubbing. As said, the MkII remained in production to this very day, but was supplemented with a number of newer versions all the same. The MkIII hardly differed from the II. The MkIV is never seen outside of Japan, but allegedly this is/was a more audiophile oriented turntable, with improved arm cabling and a 78 rpm option (in addition to a very apocryphal platinum-plating of all visible metal parts). The most up to date model is not one, but rather a family of MkVs, which are distinguished mainly by their cosmetics (up to piano black plus gold). Compared to the MkII they add a better cable, but eschew the heavy rubber mat in favour of a felt 'slip' mat. With the cheapest MkV costing more than a MkII, while offering less, I feel that the older deck still has the edge in performance/price.

Klones

No turntable has ever been copied more than the SL-1200. Its survival and widespread popularity in the DJ scene recently attracted a number of direct competitors from pro/DJ-sound manufacturers like Numark, Stanton, and Vestax. While these machines allegedly improve on the original functionality (e.g. even higher motor torque, shorter arm to facilitate scratching, smaller outline, ...), none of them are of any appeal to the audiophile community, precisely because they are so single-mindedly targetted at club use.

Then there is a spawn of much cheaper (like a silly £150!) clones that only excel at looking exactly and shamelessly like a 1200. I have handled a number of these and can say that, without exception, these 'turntables' exhibited lower mass, lower structural integrity, ringing platters, and tonearm bearings with ludicrous amounts of play in them.

Conclusions

I can't help but like this turntable a lot, with its ridiculously low price of arround £300 (internet shopping), makes it a no-brainer for quality of sound alone. Factoring in its battlecruiser build and then its easy-going functionality makes the SL-1200 a massive bargain which should be especially attractive to record collectors, club DJ's, scratch/battle DJ's and producers using many different cartridges. You don't have to take my word for it, but if you are shopping in the sub-£500 price bracket then you'd better not ignore the Technics. Whatever the experts say.