re: looking at the strobe.
My comments with regard to my obsessive strobe watching over the past few years with #2729 and the others I've had the pleasure to work on.
With regard to #2729, it has had all of the service maintenance as detailed here and also described at my website for the three TD124 refurb projects that I have detailed there:
TD124 Dept
It's late June, 2011 in the Pacific Northwest part of the United States. (I think it was 2007 when I refurbished 2729. ) Ambient temperatures in the room are around 68 deg F at the coolest and up to around 74-76 during the day.
I tend to play records on my TD124 nearly every day for at least a short period of time. But I turn the motor on when I get home from work and allow it time to warm up and get speed stable. I won't turn it off until I'm sure I'm done listening for the day.
Usually on a cold start I have a slightly slow strobe but still playable speed within a minute after switch on. I've seen it get speed stable after a few revs on a cold start. Other days it takes longer. This summer, when it gets hotter, the unit will get up to speed quicker.
Typically, when I've been playing the TD124 for long periods each day for several days in a row, I see the best cold start-up times. The deck displays its best speed pitch stability. And strobe tends to give the impression of being "locked" into 33-1/3rd rpms by an apparently un-moving strobe display.
However, if it has been several days since I've played the deck, it will be slow to come up to speed, takes more than a few seconds to get up to a playable speed, but still less than a minute. During the day, the strobe may indicate some speed drift. Drift in either direction, going slightly fast or slow. but always correctable by a very slight adjustment to the pitch control knob.
Other days, there is no speed drift. I blame it on the shaded pole motor. The E-50. In any case, as beautiful as they are, these machines are dinosaurs.
