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AR XA upgrade path from basic rebuild onward

What's the matter with the original wires? I've never quite understood this. Mine are bone stock all the way to the RCAs, they work, why mess with them?

I recently got in touch with Marc and while my XA won't make the trip to him at this time, it's got nothing to do with his pricing. I simply prefer my TD-150 and Oracle Alex in terms of handling and convenience, and decided to focus my upgrade budget on those two.
 
The original wires are 50+ years old(in most cases), and frail as hell. When mine were changed, I kid you not they were almost disintegrated. In addition to the likely possibility that they could easily break, necessitating a rewire at that point, sonically it's almost a no brainer that new Cardas wire is going to make an improvement over the old stock wires. For me, it was much more significant then any recap an amp or speaker of mine has gone through.
 
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I guess I'm lucky. I believe it's a fairly early unit (one motor, cast T-bar, metal bearings, real wood veneer) and it has all the usual problems (mat and armrest MIA, headshell on life support, sticky crinkle finish, AR logo fell off some time during the Ford administration) but the wires look healthy to me. I even think I unsoldered them a few years ago, and back on, successfully.
 
Well the good news is that you can always replace the wire when you need to. It's cheap to get a set of wire from the normal vendors. And if the XA isn't your everyday table(although I bet if it went through at least some of Marc's magic you might feel differently) then no big deal. But in general, knowing what I know now, a tonearm rewire would pretty much be on the top of my list for this table.
 
sberger said:
Well the good news is that you can always replace the wire when you need to. It's cheap to get a set of wire from the normal vendors. And if the XA isn't your everyday table(although I bet if it went through at least some of Marc's magic you might feel differently) then no big deal. But in general, knowing what I know now, a tonearm rewire would pretty much be on the top of my list for this table.
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Marc will be applying his magic to the Oracle's spindle soon :) But that's another thread.
 
I bought 2 of these from a fella at ebay. Yamamoto HS-3. This table now has a thinner platter mat on it to get closer to the 92 deg.




 
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