Last summer we got my old stereo system out of storage and hooked it up with a set of new speakers. The draw was my Dual 606 turntable; we were looking forward to playing some old records again, ones I'd been carrying around for 20 years and hadn't heard in most of that time.
It was great, listening to old vinyl and reliving the naive optimism of high school. About halfway through side four of Rush's All the World's a Stage (hey, I said naive optimism, didn't I?), the old 606 just quit. The drive motor stopped working, the strobe light went off, everything was dead. Shit.
The next day was Sunday and I Googled around for a while looking for advice about what might be wrong and whether it was worth fixing. I found a bunch of positive comments about a place called The Turntable Factory, run by a guy named Joel Thorner. I surfed over to the site and had a look. It wasn't slick or polished, one of those home-made sites where all the text is centered, the fonts are huge, and the background images and colours make your head hurt. But there was a lot of information there, and it felt like a pretty dedicated person was behind it all.
I couldn't find an exact description of my problem anywhere, so I decided to send a question to the email address advertised on the site. Within an hour, I got a response from Joel Thorner himself. In our brief exchange of emails that evening he gave me some detailed advice on the likely causes. And he declined to take any payment for the advice.
I've meant to give fixing the 606 a try, but because tearing the turntable apart is a minor project in itself, and I don't have a lot of experience with a soldering iron, I've procrastinated.
But I visited the Turntable Factory site occasionally. Along with the advice on turntable repairs, the site gave details about some serious health problems that Joel Thorner had. He suffered from emphysema, and depending on his condition, he would have to throttle back repair work. I checked back every once in a while to see how he was doing.
Sadly, Joel Thorner died last Sunday, July 1st, and the Turntable Factory is closing down. Obviously, I didn't know the man, but in my one interaction with him he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy who loved what he did and had a lot of integrity. RIP.
1 comment:
I have an ELAC/Miracord TT that my dad bought new in the 1960s, and some of my earliest memories are of spinning Beatles records on it as a tot. It fell into disrepair over the years though I continued to lug it around with me through various moves. I too had located Joel through google searches, I was impressed that he insisted I stay with the Shure cartridge that was on there even though I was willing to pay him for what he deemed to be an unnecessary upgrade. Joel was an interesting, eccentric guy with an obvious passion for not only turntables, but for life in general. Mine was evidently one of the last--possibly THE last--turntable he refurbished, as he never replied to my "thanks-for-making-this-like-new-again" email that summer of 2007. I still have his last correspondence where he relayed to me that he'd packed it up for return shipping to California, and that it was ready for another 40 years of storytelling. The turntable still preforms flawlessly 10 years later now.
Thank you Joel Thorner.
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