Fixing my Yamaha PF-800 myself just cost me close to $400....

[Mighty Favog]

So, my turntable decided not to make any sound whatsoever anymore. Strange. I hadn't moved it or played any vinyl in months. But there it is.

 

I tried swapping cables, no good.

Used a different preamp. That let it make sounds but they were staticky and the gain sounded like it was using an old dbx decoding machine on a non-encoded recording.

I considered an outboard phono preamp, giving possibility that the phono preamp inside the McIntosh C46 went south. THEN buying decent interconnects to go with it (I use Kimber Hero's)

 

Then I touched up some soldier joints to be sure.

 

So, I put the table back on the old/main system. Put on a album I blindly grabbed off the shelf (good Lord.... Steve Forbert, Jackrabbit Slim playing "Romeo's Tune"). The stylus just skated towards the spindle like nothing was holding it back. Because nothing was.

 

The cantilever was pushed up and bent beyond usability. I very lightly touched it with my finger and the cantilever cam off in my hand.

 

Now....an original VN5xMR stylus is almost impossible to find but flee-bay did have an NOS Shure V15-xMR cartridge for $1,100. Uh.......no.

 

HELLO?? JICO??

 

Seeing that Shure discontinued the cartridge and stylus a long time ago, this was my next direction. Since beryllium was almost impossible to get for Shure to make the styli, and the closest Jico they had in performance was the Sapphire model, that's what I ordered.....for $380 shipped. OUCH!!!

 

In the mean time I have 2 spare setups on Yamaha headshells; An ancient Ortofon VMS-30 MkII that sounds more relaxed and a Stanton 888ss for vinyl in bad condition.

[Islander]

Did you ever figure out how your cartridge got wrecked?  

 

Your title makes it sound like your turntable failed, but it seems like the cartridge is where the trouble was located.  That’s a bit like saying your car broke down because you got a flat tire.

[Mighty Favog]

Well, I think a switch was thrown on the back the pre-amp that converted the phone input to  standard aux input. How that happened, I have no idea. But that cause wasn't found till after I pulled the turntable and hook it up to another system to rule out the phone in the first pre-amp. That second system is in another room. And as Arnold Guthrie once said "..rather than bring that one up, we decided to throw ours down." (talking about the 1/2 ton of garbage).

But when it was on the second system it didn't sound right. Lot's of static and dbx sounding dynamic range change even though I tried different catridge loadings on the pre-amp.

 

That tells me the suspension on the stylus cantilever is old and dried out but not enough to break yet. I removed the headshell/cartridge as one unit from the tonearm when I disassembled the TT so that might have been enough jostling to break the last straw even though the guard was protecting it and I didn't touch it. 

[OO1]

 

On 8/11/2022 at 4:57 PM, Mighty Favog said:

 

I the closest Jico they had in performance was the Sapphire model, that's what I ordered.....for $380 shipped. OUCH!!!

 

the Boron  cantilever  is 206$  ,  on Ebay  , but I guess Sapphire is better   .

[Mighty Favog]

5 minutes ago, OO1 said:

 

the Boron  cantilever  is 206$  ,  on Ebay  , but I guess Sapphire is better   .

 I didn't choose the boron since I read that it really didn't match up with the quality of the original byrillium. 

[OO1]

 yep  they used Be cantilevers ,  aint that something