Rewiring turntable power harness for Magnavox Entertainment center

[bvinson]

I recently purchased a vintage Magnavox cabinet—all original—the radio works great, but the last owner took out the turntable and dropped a new one in (and connected it to the FM/MX channel). It's a basic one—that's literally the name of it. I started tinkering inside and found the turntable power harness still connected.

After looking in the manual and seeing the schematic, I realized that the turntable was plugged into phono. So I plugged in the new turntable there, hoping for better sound, and the whole system went off. I researched and found the reason for this. I have questions and need help.

1. Will rewiring the harness fix my problem if the original turntable is not connected to it? I'd love an image of the resoldering if someone has it.
2. Is there something I can connect to the harness to make it think the original turntable is at the other end (and keep the system/amp on)?
3. Should I just try to connect the 'new' turntable to the tape input (bad sound) and add a pre-amp (to hopefully get better sound)?

 

[swechsler]

1. Probably. But does your system have another way to shut off the power? Your photo isn't clear enough. If so, you should be able to google vintage turntable molex connector wiring and get some help figuring out how to override it
2. Never seen anything to do that, but it's not really a complicated DIY job
3. I'm confused about this question. Most new turntables already have a built-in phono preamp, especially one that comes with speakers. I suppose it's possible that they wired the outputs directly to the tonearm. You'd have to open up the turntable to find out. However, even if the outputs it were wired to the tonearm, connecting directly to the Magnavox's phono inputs might not help, since there's a decent chance that it originally came with a ceramic cartridge, which doesn't need a preamp because it has a relatively high output. The Basic turntable appears to have a magnetic cartridge, which has a much lower output.

 

[bvinson]

1. Probably. But does your system have another way to shut off the power? Your photo isn't clear enough. If so, you should be able to google vintage turntable molex connector wiring and get some help figuring out how to override it
2. Never seen anything to do that, but it's not really a complicated DIY job
3. I'm confused about this question. Most new turntables already have a built-in phono preamp, especially one that comes with speakers. I suppose it's possible that they wired the outputs directly to the tonearm. You'd have to open up the turntable to find out. However, even if the outputs it were wired to the tonearm, connecting directly to the Magnavox's phono inputs might not help, since there's a decent chance that it originally came with a ceramic cartridge, which doesn't need a preamp because it has a relatively high output. The Basic turntable appears to have a magnetic cartridge, which has a much lower output.

Thank you for your input.
1. The only way to turn power off is through the on/off dial, and the 'auto power off' that's happening due to the phono input. I've seen that soldering two of the wires together fixes this, but not sure if it works w/o a turntable present.
2. I'm going to skip that, LOL!
3. I was thinking that the turntable doesn't have a preamp, haven't been able to find full specs on it yet. I've seen people say "just connect it to the line in/tape input" but that sound is terrible... I thought that might be due to the turntable not having a preamp. I was thinking preamp plus tape connection could be a fix.

The new turntable is not wired to the unit, I plug it into the wall separately and audio cables into phono.

As a bit of backstory, as a safety feature, this unit shuts down the amp/power when the turntable is not spinning/ has no record to load- I guess the playing arm completes the circuit. Now that the old turntable is gone (along w/ the play arm) the unit sees the circuit as always open and shuts down whenever phono is selected on the dial. It was said that two of the wires could be soldered together to fix this but I wanted to see how that solder is done (do I cut one of the ends off and solder there, do I leave both plug ends intact and solder in the middle somewhere, etc)?

 

[swechsler]

OK, looks like this is actually an Amplok connector (labelled "Garrard" in first pic, courtesy of vinylengine). Is that the connector you have? If so, I infer from the second pic (from an ebay auction) that the switch connects pin 2 and 3 together in order to power on the system. However, exercise caution, since you're dealing with 120V. Personally, I'd probably either make an adapter, or connect the wires together inside the amp, in case I ever wanted to install an original style turntable again.

 

[gadget73]

These also didn't really have phono inputs, it would be a high impedance thing for a ceramic cartridge. Need a phono preamp to use with a magnetic phono cart. Possible your existing turntable has one built in. If the volume level isn't very low and tinny, its got a preamp in there. Output from a ceramic cartridge is ballpark of 500mv, a mag cart is more like 5mv.