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 carry, 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 moderately tightfisted of Technics to produce a costly, lavishly specified document participant like this with the type 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 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 applicable to be used with its document 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 tough 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 price to the asking worth.
Nonetheless, so far as the sound of the Technics SL-1300G is worried, there’s actually just one facet through which it’s not straightforwardly wonderful. This isn’t a cheap turntable and it will get pricier nonetheless by the point it’s truly able to perform, however the way in which it performs goes an awfully good distance towards making the outlay appear honest sufficient.
Nice Sound
Each by way of the way in which it goes about issues on a sonic stage and the type of music it’s comfy coping with, the SL-1300G has what sporty varieties wish to check with as “an all-court recreation.” It doesn’t matter for those who ask it to play a duplicate 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 House of All Prospects, it’s all the identical to the Technics. In each circumstance it’s a brilliantly poised, endlessly musical, profoundly analytical, and uncomplicatedly entertaining hear.
On the evaluation aspect, the SL-1300G is approaching forensic. At each level of the frequency vary it will possibly determine and contextualize even essentially the most transient, fleeting, and/or minor occurrences in a recording, give them applicable 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 whenever you stand up near it, you discover it’s alive with the advantageous particulars that make for a convincing and coherent entire.
