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Romy the Cat
Boston, MA
Posts 10,449
Joined on 05-27-2004
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Post #:
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8
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Post ID:
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29630
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Reply to:
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29629
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Well, there is more to it...
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It is not about “not good enough.” Micro Seiki caught my interest in 1999, primarily because of their larger turntables, and naturally, since I was in that mood, I acquired a lot of Micro equipment. There is a certain sense of beauty to the Micro top-of-the-line arm, and it looks very beautiful on large Micro table. When I visited the company back in 2000. I have seen this configuration in their damn room and I said that I would like to have the same.
At that time I had a double-decker setup with the 8000 and the 5000, and four arms in operation: the 282, the 3012, a custom arm, and the 3009. They all carried different cartridges for different purposes. It took me a couple of years to understand which combinations were more or less suitable — my cartridges, my playing styles, my records, and my tonearms.
What I eventually observed was that my best mono cartridges and my best stereo cartridges were not on the Micro MA-282 arm, and actually even the 3009, in my view, was often more interesting. The 282 was a superbly comfortable tonearm. I liked its operation — I liked everything about it — and I eventually set it up with my ugliest Denon 103 cartridge, with which I played records that I did not even bother to wash. That is how I used that arm for years. Later, when I switched to a single-deck turntable, I stopped using the 282.
For a person who experienced a psychological pleasure from using equipment as one of a form of projection — the stories subscribed,, the beauty of engineering, the satisfaction of owning a tonearm produced by a "respected" company — such an object certainly had value. Sometimes in the past I completely abandoned that attitude and became almost blind to all that vintage fascination. My current attitude may be explained by that my past.
From the perspective not of admiration but of pure reasoning, I think the whole concept of the 282 arm is somewhat faulty. You see, the 282 comes from a time when turntables were the only medium, and Micro produced many very low-budget turntables. Some of them even worked in vertical configurations, and at that time many companies experimented with the idea of tonearms with constant pressure that would not depend on gravity.
One of the ideas was to create a tonearm where the VTF is defined by the tension of a torsion rod. This type of tonearm can work even upside down. The 282 is exactly that type of arm, where the tracking force is moderated by the tension of a bar, and this itself might be one of the reasons why the arm does not sound as good as the best other tonearms.
Of course, I am not in the business of defining tonearm geopolitics, and I may be completely wrong. But notice that none of the tonearms we generally consider to be the best sounding use tension bars. That might be one possible explanation. I may be wrong about it as well. I might even be wrong that the tonearm sounds bad.
One way or another, now you know about the 282 as much as I do — whether I am right or wrong..
"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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