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 popular. It makes use of gimbal suspension and high-precision bearings, and features a multistage counterweight, a user-adjustable anti-skate mechanism, a elevate, 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 relatively tightfisted of Technics to provide a costly, lavishly specified report participant like this with the kind of humdrum, run-of-the-mill stereo interconnects that your $50 CD participant got here with, however a minimum of 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 recommend, is approaching “unforgivable” as an omission.
{Photograph}: Simon Lucas
No Cartridge
For this cash, not solely do I count on 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 might take—cartridge fitment is a notoriously difficult feat of guide labor that nobody appears to be like ahead to. I truthfully assume it might higher serve its clients if Technics provided and fitted an honest cartridge after which added the associated fee to the asking value.
Nonetheless, so far as the sound of the Technics SL-1300G is worried, there’s actually just one side through which it’s not straightforwardly wonderful. This isn’t an affordable 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 great distance towards making the outlay appear honest sufficient.
Nice Sound
Each by way of the best way it goes about issues on a sonic degree and the kind of music it’s comfy coping with, the SL-1300G has what sporty sorts prefer to check with as “an all-court game.” It doesn’t matter in the event you ask it to play a replica of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as carried out by the Cleveland Orchestra, Refrain, and Boys Choir underneath Michael Tilson Thomas or a disc of James Holden’s Think about It is a Excessive Dimensional Area 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 could actually determine and contextualize even essentially the most transient, fleeting, and/or minor occurrences in a recording, give them acceptable weighting, and place them confidently on its giant and spacious soundstage. Even the place essentially the most negligible harmonic variations in a voice or instrument are involved, the Technics pounces on them like its life trusted it. This isn’t on the expense of the general image, however once you stand up near it, you discover it’s alive with the advantageous particulars that make for a convincing and coherent entire.
