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Rewiring a Thorens TP16 mkII using 32 ga. silver wire and Cardas cartridge clips.
Thanks goes to Wei Zhu for sending in these pics. A lot of folks have asked about rewiring the TP16. Now we have a great example. See procedure at bottom.
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above photo #6: original wire attached.
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above photo #7: close up
Wei's procedure:
1)
Unsolder the tonearm wires at the base and unwind them (this makes it easy when
you want to pull the whole wire out), remove the metal cable of the cue
mechanism ( it is better to do it at the knob end). Remove 3 screws from arm
board then whole arm is free. The arm can be separated to two parts, at the end
of the front part and beginning of the back part there are two dowels as shown
on the picture, you can remove them with a pin punch by a light striking force
to push the dowel through. Then use pliers to finish the job (be careful
not to hurt the bearing on the arm).
2)
The two plastic connectors at both end are glued to the arm tube, use pliers to
loosen them from the tube (in my case, they are not glued very well), disconnect
the cartridge end then pull the two wires out directly. After that I pushed the
dowels back. (For safe keeping)
3)
The brown wire is ground wire, doesn't need to be pulled out. I rewired the arm
with 32ga teflon silver wire from A-M
4)
I still keep the original solder post, but flood it with cardas solder, give the tonearm wire enough head room to keep it from hindering the movement of tonearm. I use DIY IC with cardas SLVR at one end and the other end directly connected to the post, they are also 32 ga silver wire as I have a lot left from Chris VH Silver IC receipt, I just put the wire in 28 awg teflon tube then winded 2 wire with a empty tube together, shield them with belden 8660 braided shield and grounded them at RCA end, leave on channel float and the other one connected to the brown ground wire. I do not worry about the capacitance the wire gives as it is only 0.5m and I am using the Grado Red MM cartridge.
5)
The cartridge side I use Cardas PCCE clips, sanding the teflon coating a little bit to get it removed then solder the wire directly to the clips.
6)
The whole length of the wire finished about 35cm, but I cut my wire at 40cm at the beginning.
When I got my Thorens TD-145 MKII, the sound was dull. Ever since I changed the rusted RCA connector (nothing else), it sounded better than my LC Audio modified Rotel RCD 971 ( and I was using the Radio Shack little RAT phono amp, only US$25) . It is highly recommended to change the whole wire first (at least out side part) as I can see rust everywhere along the signal line. Using all silver wire did improve the sound a lot, clean and accurate, although bright and lean at the first 30 hours. BTW, I am using a MothAudio 2A3 amp (AVVT mesh plate 2A3) with Lowther DX3 an All Fun Horn.
Regards
Wei