Been a while since I last worked on a turntable, but I couldn't pass this one up. Picked up a Garrard Synchro-Lab 95B on Marketplace for the whopping price of $0 from a guy clearing out an old rental house on the east side of Seattle. Wish I'd asked for more details on the story, or if anything else was left behind, but I didn't feel like pressing my luck or being too nosy. This one looked well taken care of, with an unusual plinth and a clean dust cover, so I figured it was a classic case of Garrard Glue.
The first order of business was replacing the very sketchy-looking power cord, which was held together with duct tape and a dream. I replaced it with a generic cord from the hardware store, and got to trying this thing out. According to him, the motor worked but wouldn't stay on. True to his word, the motor started and immediately shut off when I tried the manual on-off switch, which is a good thing since the motor sounded absolutely horrendous. I tore it apart expecting the magnet to have separated from the rotor (a notorious failure point on the early Synchro Lab motors), but thankfully it was just a dry bearing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the idler tire and motor mounts were still in great shape, and even more surprised to find out that the familiar dark brown Garrard Glue was missing, and in its' place was a strange green grease. A sticker under the tonearm indicated that it had been serviced in 1994, indicating that the previous owner really took care of this thing. The old grease cleaned up pretty easily, and it only took a couple hours to get everything apart and back together again. The big switch assembly under the platter put up a bit of a fight, being almost frozen in place, but some penetrating oil and a heat gun worked it loose so I could clean the old junk out and give it a few drops of sewing machine oil.
Amazingly, everything worked like a charm once I had it buttoned back up, even the auto changer! That has almost never happened in all my history of working on these things. Anyone who knows these know they put up at least something of a fight before they're properly sorted again, but this one's been ready to go. I gotta say, I'm quite impressed with this thing. My previous experiences with Garrard left me somewhat cold - they always felt a bit clunky and flimsy, with rumbly platters and clattering mechanics that never inspired confidence compared to their Dual rivals. However, they got a lot of things right with the SL95B. The tonearm is solid, the anti-skate weight doesn't fall down, rumble is minimal, and the switches are smooth and no longer jostle the entire turntable. The headshell is honestly the biggest letdown of this turntable, as there is no provision for aligning the cartridge in the headshell, you just gotta bolt it in and pray it's aligned properly. The Shure M75ED T2 that it came with sounds just fine, and tracks reliably at 1.25g, but it's going to make finding a nice replacement cartridge a bit tricky since there isn't a standard distance between the tip of the stylus and the mounting holes as far as I'm aware. If I end up hanging onto it, I might try and 3D-print an adjustable headshell. Other than that, I just need to track down or fashion a single-play spindle, since it only came with the auto-stacker.
The first order of business was replacing the very sketchy-looking power cord, which was held together with duct tape and a dream. I replaced it with a generic cord from the hardware store, and got to trying this thing out. According to him, the motor worked but wouldn't stay on. True to his word, the motor started and immediately shut off when I tried the manual on-off switch, which is a good thing since the motor sounded absolutely horrendous. I tore it apart expecting the magnet to have separated from the rotor (a notorious failure point on the early Synchro Lab motors), but thankfully it was just a dry bearing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the idler tire and motor mounts were still in great shape, and even more surprised to find out that the familiar dark brown Garrard Glue was missing, and in its' place was a strange green grease. A sticker under the tonearm indicated that it had been serviced in 1994, indicating that the previous owner really took care of this thing. The old grease cleaned up pretty easily, and it only took a couple hours to get everything apart and back together again. The big switch assembly under the platter put up a bit of a fight, being almost frozen in place, but some penetrating oil and a heat gun worked it loose so I could clean the old junk out and give it a few drops of sewing machine oil.
Amazingly, everything worked like a charm once I had it buttoned back up, even the auto changer! That has almost never happened in all my history of working on these things. Anyone who knows these know they put up at least something of a fight before they're properly sorted again, but this one's been ready to go. I gotta say, I'm quite impressed with this thing. My previous experiences with Garrard left me somewhat cold - they always felt a bit clunky and flimsy, with rumbly platters and clattering mechanics that never inspired confidence compared to their Dual rivals. However, they got a lot of things right with the SL95B. The tonearm is solid, the anti-skate weight doesn't fall down, rumble is minimal, and the switches are smooth and no longer jostle the entire turntable. The headshell is honestly the biggest letdown of this turntable, as there is no provision for aligning the cartridge in the headshell, you just gotta bolt it in and pray it's aligned properly. The Shure M75ED T2 that it came with sounds just fine, and tracks reliably at 1.25g, but it's going to make finding a nice replacement cartridge a bit tricky since there isn't a standard distance between the tip of the stylus and the mounting holes as far as I'm aware. If I end up hanging onto it, I might try and 3D-print an adjustable headshell. Other than that, I just need to track down or fashion a single-play spindle, since it only came with the auto-stacker.
