• The move to the new server is done. There are some software and database maintenance updates in process. This has us passing the hat around to help out. We appreciate any donations. Seriously, even a dollar helps. The payment page may be found here - https://www.audiokarma.org/support.html

Any Lenco L75 users?

W

Wil84

Active Member
Did a search and nothing much came up; quite surprised considering the monster Lenco thread on audiogon..

Just wanna ask, are there any lenco users ard here?

Im using a L75 / RB300 / AT-430 cart. ( modded ultra thick plinth of course - 12 layers in all :yes: )

Dont have a chance to compare them with other decks so i thought i did post here and ask for opinions.

And yes, i think the Lenco L75 is a supreb turntable after modifications. :D
 
Register to hide this ad
WillbeWill?
Been here for or five or six months. Chummed the waters a couple of times about Lencos with not even a nibble, which is a little suprising considering the strong bootstapping DIY ethic that lives in many here at Audio Karma.
But that may end when my two, rebuilt, re-armed and nearly replinthed Lencos debut at AKfest 06. (Grumpy, I'm going to need a reinforced table.)
 
Hehehe real nice mopic5,

All the best at the fest. Im sure u'll get many a jaws going agape when they hear the lenco in action! :thmbsp:
 
Thought I’d upload some Lenco works in progress for AKFest ’06.
Pic #1 – Lenco L-75. Stripped, cleaned, lubed and painted. Awaiting rearming and install into mass constrained layered plinth. Vertical idler driven platter weighs 9 lbs. and is hand balanced. Idler driven by 4-pole high torque motor also hand balanced in Swiss factory.
Pic #2 – Bogen-Presto Lenco L-61 (Badged for American consumption circa 1970). On stilts awaiting its own plinth and playing in my home system. Re-armed with Sonus Formula IV Unipivot (longer tube version of Mayware IV). Cart temporarily shimmed to accommodate VTA on Lenco’s typically low-slung platters. Armboard under top plate in new plinth will accommodate VTA.
Pic #3 – Plinth for Lenco L-75. “The Sandwich” as it is known is made up of alternating layers of plywood (in example here 13-ply Baltic birch) and MDF. In addition to the four top plate bolts, the Lenco will couple to the plinth with screws through the platter well.
This application will have two arms with a Rega 300 mounted in the rear and the “normal” position getting prepped for various armboards. Lenco gets rotated 90 to make both arms accessible.
Pic #4 – Ortofon AS-212 with fabricated metal armboard to accommodate arm-lift mechanism/linkage from the Telefunken DD from which it was pulled.
Pic #5 – Frivolous Fun Feet. Tungsten anodes from 3KW xenon theatre bulbs with homebrew depth adjusts.
 

Attachments

  • clip_image001.jpg
    clip_image001.jpg
    27.7 KB · Views: 164
  • clip_image002.jpg
    clip_image002.jpg
    24 KB · Views: 171
  • clip_image004.jpg
    clip_image004.jpg
    30 KB · Views: 164
  • clip_image005.jpg
    clip_image005.jpg
    56.4 KB · Views: 129
  • clip_image003.jpg
    clip_image003.jpg
    31.1 KB · Views: 110
Will,
Not a Lenco user yet but I'm still looking for that special deal. There doesn't seem to be all that many in my neck of the woods (Colorado). I did find a Dual 1219 that I've been working on to get started in the idler mode. I'm still lurking and following the Audiogon thread. I have tried Jean's suggestions of the 24 ga solid core and Petra cables.

Steve
 
I'm a Lenco owner (L75) but I haven't used it yet. Mine is lacking a headshell. I will make a plinth like the ones above and mount some kind of arm (a Rega RB300, perhaps?). I just lifted the platter off to inspect things and saw a nice metal idler wheel and all over clean inards.

- Harald
 
Steve;
Consider a garage-sailing vacation to our Great Neighbor to the North. Canada took boatloads of Lencos in its hayday while the US was locked into mainly Garrard imports. The Dual 1219 sounds like an interesting project - Also keep you eyes open for Rek-O-Kut Rondine's. They can be had pretty cheap in the US and are good candidates for "The Make-Over". I've got one up on stilts awaiting post Lenco attention.
Harald; Good Score! You've got the creme de la idler creme there.
 
Harald;
Attempts I've read about breathing new sonic life into Lenco tonearms have not yielded very good results. Tomorrow I'll try to e-mail you a list tonearms (some that have close effective lengths - others that require under top-plate armboards) from a fellow Audiogoner's site.
 
Thanks for the advice, guys!

Mopic, thanks for your effort. I have already stored such a list on my computer.

I'm not going to shell out €65 for a NOS Lenco headshell, since my plan is to use another tonearm. I got the L75 for approx. $15 at the local SA, so I'm quite happy.

At some point in the future I'll have a shootout between my SL-1200mk2(w KAB damper), Dual 714Q (for which I recently got the required headshell adapter) and a heavy plinth Lenco. When the dust settles I'll sell the loosers (OK, I may keep one for backup).

- Harald
 
Count me in!

Last year I started to read the thread on Audiogon, but gave up after a few pages. Then a couple of months ago I started reading it again, took 2 weeks of a couple hours a night to get to the end. By the end I was convinced I would give one a try. My birthday was last month and my wife asked me what I wanted and I said a Lenco L75 that was on e-bay and she said I could have it. I won it and began e-mailing the seller about shipping instructions which he fully obliged. It arrived safely but was missing the tone arm weights and headshell. He had taken them off but forgot to pack them. They arrived 2 days ago, the stylus trashed by being banged around by the arm weights. Today I found time to mount an old Grado black to the headshell and set the VTF close and turned it on - terrible hum and no sound out of the left channel. Traced the hum to a broken ground solder joint in the RCA jack, hit it with the iron, and hooked it back up. Loaded up a lp and sat down. Good thing I sat down, I was totally blown away by the sound. Even with the original arm ( v blocks are shot ), no anti skate, and the Grado black, I was grinning from ear to ear! Yes, what I had been reading was true. It will be the best table I own, and I own a few respectable decks. No comparison. I can't wait until I have it in a monster plinth with two good arms and much better carts ( yes I am going to make it a two armed monster ). I have already purchased and recieved a new Denon DL 103 and a lighty used Grado Sonata for this project. Now I have to figure out what I want it to look like ( the plinth ) and decide on the arms to use. I have a Sumiko Premier FT 4 that I may yank off my Thorens TD 125 MKII, and I am going to look for a Black Widow and a modded Rega RB 250 or 300.
So count me in as a Lenco lover. And if any of you who have been down this road would like to give me any tips or suggestions, feel free to chime in. I'd really love to hear of your experiences and what tables you have that the Lenco puts to shame. I've been spinning vinyl all night, just like a little kid with a new toy. Wait - I resemble that.

Still grinning, DSOTM MoFi is spinning.

Kim
 
Got a couple of goldring/lenco gl85's i think the model number is,havent used em for a while.................One is in a plinth marked tandberg....,hmmmmm:)
 
Hi Wilburchubs,

Those GL/85s I believe are belt driven. A lot of the Lenco excitement is over their unique designed Idlers with hand balanced high torque motors driving heavy (4 kilo) platters (also balanced in many cases). However, this company did many things well, so I'd be curious to get your reactions on how these early belt-drives perform.

Hey Kim,
We could use a reprint of your excitement over at the "Home Despot" right now. "The Thread" (3+ years & 3K+ posts) is in the midst of a roller coaster ride this weekend - bruised feelings leading to deathly silence - you know the routine. A post like your's would warm the cockles of Mr. Nantais' heart right about now.
This in no way is meant to disparage AK, and it's great that you posted here. Things are always bit more relaxed at AK, and lately I'm reading and posting more here than there.
For Lenco resources here, you've got Harald, Will and myself - that I know of. All L-75 owners. Whatever you need.
With the Sumiko and Rega arms, you'll have to abandon the original Lenco armhole. By the way, the DL 103 & Grado Sonata are excellent cartridge matches for those arms.
After having started my two-armed plinth, another AudioGoner came up with an excellent design that was really thinking outside the box. It's a little hard to describe - I'll try and run down a picture - but it allowed the arms to be mounted much closer to each other (55 to 60 degrees) rather than the 90 a box design dictates. This means that you can situate the plinth so that both arms are easier to access. If I had the chance to do my design over again - this is the way I'd go.

All best,
Mario
 
Mario,
Thanks for the encouragement. I posted this on Audiogon per your suggestion. Yes I agree the tone has been a little somber there. On 3-27 I posted a question on Audiogon concerning opinions on the Premier FT 4, but no one has replied. I find that kind of strange, the Premier MMT was once like the Rega in popularity, and the FT 4 was one step below the TOTL of Premier, two steps above the MMT. I figured somone would chime in, but I fear it will be buried without an answer.

Yes, I don't plan on using the original arm hole. I plan on going the removeable arm plate route. Did any of you use a template from someone else for the cutouts in the plinth for the deck or did you just make your own? I have a folder of Lenco stuff and there is one posted in there somewhere but I wonder if I would be able to print it out to full size. Time to get ready for work, more later.

Kim
 
Hey Kim,

Good man on posting over on “Desperate Despot”. If anything will stir Jean to move on with it, it will be a post like yours. I searched for your Sumiko Premier question but couldn’t find it. Could it have been pulled for some reason? I had one long post mysteriously pulled from that thread last year. Without explanation it was puzzling because I didn’t slam anybody or any product. Oh well …. Yes, questions often get ignored – happens a lot.

As for your missing plastic tab on the speed control lever, you might have a wait in getting a stock one. In the meantime, a soft vinyl screw cover (they come in black, white and red at full service hardware stores) might temporarily do the trick.

I just bought a Sumiko MMT mounted on a Linn armboard for $50 a couple of weeks ago. It supposedly had “bearing issues”, but after closely checking it out in the basement sale section of a local audio store, I gathered that gimble/pivot play was misdiagnosed as a problem. It does have a hum and possible wiring issue.

So here’s a question for you. Does your Sumiko Premier interconnect have two grounds? (Not cartridge grounds – but separate) Mine does and it’s curious as this adds up to six wires for a five pin DIN. One runs the length of the interconnect and is obviously meant to ground at the preamp. The other is a short, 12” run from the DIN. It seems that this might be for equipment ground (i.e. motor chassis/bearing sump), but when I attached it to tt equipment it did nothing about the hum. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Mario
 
Kim,

Attached is that picture of Leepesjee's “Out of the box” Lenco design. As you can see, with a bit of planning for swing arcs, tube type and effective length, one could possibly go three-arm – though that’s over-the-top to me.

As far as a template goes, I believe the starter of this thread (Wil84) made an e-template for the L-75 plinth. As I remember it prints out in multiple pages to be pasted together. I could never get my printer set up properly to ever print them so I ended up diving in without a template.

- Mario
 

Attachments

  • L-75-OUT-box 1.JPG
    L-75-OUT-box 1.JPG
    182.7 KB · Views: 81
Hi all,
must have the wrong model number,this thing has the huge tapered motor spindle with the idler arm and the heavy platter,ill dig em out an check the number. :D
 
Hi Mario

Sorry for the delay in answering your question. The din plug has no separate wire for a ground. Mine terminates in a PIB-2 interface box. There is a separate ground wire from the ground terminal on the PIB that grounds to the chassis of my Thorens. There are five wires inside the PIB. The cable from the din is sheilded in braided wire mesh and the mesh is grounded to the PIB box. I don't know if this helps, but it's what I got.

Kim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom