The SL-1300G arrives fitted with a light-weight, inflexible aluminum pipe tonearm. It’s 9 inches lengthy, and is the usual static-balance S-shape Technics has lengthy since most well-liked. It makes use of gimbal suspension and high-precision bearings, and features a multistage counterweight, a user-adjustable anti-skate mechanism, a raise, and a tonearm lock.
The RCA sockets you’ll use to attach your SL-1300G to an amplifier are a) gold-plated, and b) buried deep beneath the physique of the deck. It appears somewhat tightfisted of Technics to provide a costly, lavishly specified report participant like this with the form of humdrum, run-of-the-mill stereo interconnects that your $50 CD participant got here with, however at the least there are connections there within the field, together with a lead for mains energy. What you will not discover is a cartridge and this, I’d counsel, is approaching “unforgivable” as an omission.
{Photograph}: Simon Lucas
No Cartridge
For this cash, not solely do I anticipate the producer to have researched and recognized the cartridge it thinks most acceptable to be used with its report participant, however to have prefitted it to its headshell for my comfort. Because it stands, you’re round $500 (minimal) for a cartridge able to doing the SL-1300G justice, and who is aware of how lengthy becoming and balancing it will take—cartridge fitment is a notoriously difficult feat of handbook labor that nobody appears to be like ahead to. I actually suppose it will higher serve its clients if Technics equipped and fitted a good cartridge after which added the associated fee to the asking worth.
Nonetheless, so far as the sound of the Technics SL-1300G is anxious, there’s actually just one side wherein it’s not straightforwardly wonderful. This isn’t a reasonable turntable and it will get pricier nonetheless by the point it’s really able to perform, however the best way it performs goes an awfully good distance towards making the outlay appear truthful sufficient.
Nice Sound
Each when it comes to the best way it goes about issues on a sonic degree and the form of music it’s comfy coping with, the SL-1300G has what sporty sorts prefer to confer with as “an all-court recreation.” It doesn’t matter should you ask it to play a replica of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as carried out by the Cleveland Orchestra, Refrain, and Boys Choir beneath Michael Tilson Thomas or a disc of James Holden’s Think about It is a Excessive Dimensional House of All Potentialities, it’s all the identical to the Technics. In each circumstance it’s a brilliantly poised, endlessly musical, profoundly analytical, and uncomplicatedly entertaining pay attention.
On the evaluation aspect, the SL-1300G is approaching forensic. At each level of the frequency vary it will probably determine and contextualize even probably the most transient, fleeting, and/or minor occurrences in a recording, give them acceptable weighting, and place them confidently on its massive and spacious soundstage. Even the place probably the most negligible harmonic variations in a voice or instrument are involved, the Technics pounces on them like its life relied on it. This isn’t on the expense of the general image, however whenever you rise up near it, you discover it’s alive with the wonderful particulars that make for a convincing and coherent entire.
