HOME CINEMA CHOICE SEPTEMBER 2019
THE FIRST QUESTION I’m asking myself as I sit
down to write is: 'do I want to take a break from
Dolby Atmos and 4K Blu-ray and tell you about an
old, obscure turntable from the Far East?' Of course
I do. Vinyl rocks.
The second question I'm asking myself is: 'should
I have bought it?'. Certainly, the conditions for
a colossal mess had aligned like the Sun and
Stonehenge on June 24 a few days before. But by the
time I realized what was happening it was too late
and the mysterious forces were too strong: boot sale
(black hole-like attraction), old and once expensive
turntable priced to tempt (irresistible) and, among
the small interested gathering, only I knew what
it was (misspent youth). I grabbed a bargain.
Back in the early 1990s, something called the
CEC ST-930 was the turntable you bought instead
of a Linn Sondek LP12/Pink Triangle/Michell GyroDec
if you were a) completely clueless, b) addicted to
living dangerously or c) unusually well informed.
The conventional wisdom, of course, was that
if you were going to entrust the well-being of your
precious vinyl collection in the burgeoning age of
Compact Disc to just one, fi nal, forever-and-a-day
turntable, it was fortunate that rightly revered
companies such as Linn, Pink Triangle, Roksan et al
were at your beck and call to sell you, in exchange
for upwards of £1,000, the deck of your dreams.
Given this, it wasn’t hard to understand why the
dwindling (but ever more trenchant) analogue camp
had accorded a wannabe big-league turntable from
an undistinguished Far East maker of budget CD
players – CEC – the sort of recognition that would
have disappointed the invisible man. The CEC
ST-930 (£2,050 with SME IV arm and Ortofon
MC2000II cartridge, £630 as a motor unit only) was
only available through 25 dealers in the UK and had
eff ectively gatecrashed what die-hards were
(prematurely) calling the last party in town,
by creeping quietly through a side door.
It was something of a lost cause. The ST-930,
although a reasonable seller in the US, created
ripples that might have been made by a small piece
of grit in the UK. So tepid was the takeup, it was the
last turntable CEC ever made. Which seems a shame
in the light of the following.
Before it decided to manufacture its own
turntable, the massive and massively expensive
model 30, UK brand SME used an ST-930 as a
testbed for its arms and, so the story goes, was so
impressed with the quietness and speed stability of
the motor unit and the inherently stable four-point
suspension system, that it contracted CEC to supply
it with the former and employed the principle of the
latter for its own high-end design.
Not a bad endorsement and a useful thing to
know when you’re staring at a rather sad-looking
CEC ST-930 (sans arm) on a Formica-topped
kitchen table being fl ogged for £50.
Of course I bought it. Later, when I got home,
I switched it on and the platter went round and
round. It’s a start.
From what I can gather, the ST-930 was a smooth
and musical performer – especially with the SME
arm. Its laid-back presentation was said to be
particularly well suited to classical and jazz (a huge
plus for me – the jazz bit, anyway), and certainly
a cut above the common-or-garden models of the
day. Sad to say, with three turntables already dotted
around the house and loudspeakers literally forming
an orderly queue in the hall, I've yet to show it any
TLC. Let’s call it a work in progress. Long live vinyl Q
Vinyl junkie David Vivian was thrilled to discover a cult favourite 1990s turntable lurking
at a car boot sale. Now he just needs to show it a little TLC
Have you found any second-hand AV bargains?
Let us know: email [email protected]
David Vivian's
passions are
movies, music and
cars – he likes to
combine them
by watching
The Blues Brothers
once a fortnight
72 OPINION
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