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 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 somewhat 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 not less than 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 report participant, however to have prefitted it to its headshell for my comfort. Because it stands, you’re taking a look at 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 tough feat of handbook labor that nobody appears to be like ahead to. I actually assume it might higher serve its prospects if Technics provided and fitted a good cartridge after which added the fee to the asking value.
Nonetheless, so far as the sound of the Technics SL-1300G is worried, there’s actually just one side by which it’s not straightforwardly glorious. This isn’t an affordable turntable and it will get pricier nonetheless by the point it’s really able to perform, however the way in which it performs goes an awfully great distance towards making the outlay appear honest sufficient.
Nice Sound
Each when it comes to the way in which it goes about issues on a sonic stage and the kind of music it’s snug coping with, the SL-1300G has what sporty varieties prefer to check with as “an all-court recreation.” It doesn’t matter in case you ask it to play a duplicate 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 This can be a Excessive Dimensional Area 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 may possibly establish 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 rise up near it, you discover it’s alive with the high quality particulars that make for a convincing and coherent complete.