September 10,2024. My girlfriend, her sister, and I went to see Hozier at Shoreline Amphitheatre and got an unforgettable performance (Nobody’s Soldier is my favorite to hear live for that sweet bassline)
When buying merch, my girlfriend decided to buy her favorite album as a vinyl record, ” Wasteland, Baby!”.
Problem. Neither of us own a turntable.
Jump forward to March 2025. This record has been sitting on my shelf ever since and I felt it was a waste to not be able to play music on it.
I had settled down in a new job and got enough money to comfortable invest in buying a turntable, unaware of how deep I’d get into vinyl collecting later. I was also heavily diversifying my music tastes and becoming more actively aware and invested in the types of music that I listen to, so it would be cool to have something physical to represent my love for culture.
I didn’t do extensive research into turntable prior to buying one. I knew of cheap intro level turntables like the Audio Technica LP60x, just to get a approximate price range of available models.
But I have a interest in vintage stuff, so I went to a local record store to see what models that have instead, Needle to the Groove next to SJSU.
Small store, mainly old second-hand records like jazz and rock rather than new pop releases. In the back, there were 3 turntables for sale.
A for-parts Marantz TT-2200 Direct Drive turntable, 125$. I was not a fan of the housing so I didn’t ask about the condition.
A Technics SL-220 Frequency Generator Servo Automatic Turntable (what a mouthful). This was in complete working order where the shop attendant actually used it to DJ within recent memory. Sold for much higher than the others so I was considering it.
A Marantz 6100 turntable, $225 for parts as is. The attendant said the belt had complete dry-rotted away, it’s missing its head cartridge, and the grounding cable likely needed replacement. A lot of elbow grease is needed to make this play again. For the price and missing cartridge, it didn’t seem like the wisest decision compared to a complete working model.
But I loved the wood frame. So I bought it.
Carried the table down the street to the garage amongst the SJSU students. I couldn’t wait to repair it. But I also had no idea how to do that.
Time to repair
First things first. What condition is it actually in?
(Maybe someday I’ll make a video montage of my cleaning/repair, but I’ll have to cut audio since you can hear the Vtuber stream in the background loud and clear. whoops)
With the platter removed, you can see the dry rotted rubber belt that I would need to scrap off and clean before anything else. For the most part, everything looked fine and spins okay.
Here’s a video of checking every moving function on the turntable. You can hear the AC motor hum and feel the spindle rotate, so no need to replace that. The automatic return engages and makes a satisfying click to my ears. One thing online comments mentioned is the anti-skate weight is easy to lose, so its good that it’s still there.
The belt residue was easy to scrap off. A little mark was left of the metal but most important, none was left on the platter.
The old lubricant on the underside for the tone arm dropper was sticky so I replaced it all with new white lithium grease. Actually while I was at it, I cleaned out and greased every single rotating piece (those shaft clips were such a pain!). Verified the tone arm retracts slowly, which is used to softly drop the needle onto the record.
None of the electronics appear broken or frayed, actually pretty decent condition. The motor is supported entirely by the rubber isolators, which is something to check if there are additional screws left during shipping to secure the motor to the frame. Not ideal for noiseless playback.
AC motor is lubricated with 3-in-1 electric motor oil.
As for the cables, the Marantz 6100 outputs direct signals from the cartridge through RCA connectors + stranded grounding cable. Although the connectors didn’t look completely broken, I decided to splice it further down as I noticed some rubber shielding had worn off exposing the metal grounding sheath.
I bought a new pair of belts for the turntable but I was super impatient, so I tried making a new one from electrical tape. You’d be surprised how well that worked after a few failed attempts at getting the tension and length right.
Armed with a turntable preamp from Amazon and AT-VM95E head shell + cartridge combo, I finally put the vinyl record on to play to my girlfriend. I didn’t have a proper amp yet but I did have a boombox with adjustable volume gain and composite signal in so I plugged the preamp straight and and cranked it all the way up.
Hurrah! The table has now turned into a turntable.
Hozier’s beautiful voice came through. All things considered the electrical tape belt was consistent enough for playback, with minor speed variance that causes sustained notes to sound like he’s going through slight puberty or notes off-key. It’s okay, we all have those days.
Now that something is actually playing, one big problem appeared. The automatic turntable wasn’t doing its automatic thing. Why’s that?
When I touched the driving gear for the automatic return feature, you can see it’s actually tilting a lot. When it’s all straightened up, it engages the center spindle and performs the return feature as expected.
The culprit? The three shaft collar pins that are press fitted into the driving gear had sheared off.
In fact, this entire shaft collar was crumbling. It crumbled in my hand when I removed it from the shaft.
This is exactly the kind of problem a 3D printer is used for! It was awkward to print the three pins again, especially for FDM layer strength, so I opted to have it a flat face and super glue it into place. This does require some tuning before gluing to make sure the return function starts at the right position.
The proper belt came in. I bought a FOSI Audio V3 amp. I thrifted a couple of cheap passive speakers. It seemed like it was complete.
But of course, more issues. When the turntable disconnects power after auto-returning, it makes a audible popping sound. This was likely a failed capacitor across the mains power unable to smooth out the abrupt loss in power, resulting in electrical noise picked up by the cartridge. Not too hard to replace, its just the black box across the power solder joints. It even has the capacitance value clearly visible how nice!
And finally, that closes out the turntable repair. As of October 2025, this has been my only turntable and my vinyl collection has only grown drastically. Since then, I had swapped the cartridge with a AT-VM95ML because the 95E cartridge needle got bent (whoops, beginner hobbyist trials) and got new speakers (larger thrifted speakers in a wood box and a Yamaha subwoofer for 30bucks!).
A brief comment on music
While getting into record collecting has been quite a financial investment, it has definitely changed my perspective on how I approach music today.
With the dominance of streaming today, music and culture in general is treated like a factory line. Easy to access and plentiful which sounds wonderful on paper but leads to poor situations like manufactured talent or undeserved favoritism. Art should be raw and unpredictable, it cannot be forced out of someone to achieve a bare minimum quota.
I used to passive consume music at large. With a service like Spotify to automatically play music based on the algorithm, it’s not hard at all to just throw something in the background and treat it as noise.
Great for finding new music, but over time it felt disingenuous to artists that struggle to break out from the algorithm, such as indie music which I began to fall in love with.
Records themselves didn’t solve my issue of actively paying attention to music and supporting small artists (records and distributors historically are exploitive to smaller artists, that exploitation only evolved into modern streaming). But it was a physical representation of taking things in more deliberately. Introduce a ritual by which you appreciate music and take time out of my day to sit down and process lyrics.
Sure, pop you can passive absorb by design (that 4/4 time signature and upfront writing). But for artists like Hozier, the Backseat Lovers, or Radiohead that transport me to a whole new perspective, I always end up lost in my head no matter what I do.
Perhaps we need that more in our world.
kenneth chung / mechameka0 blog 
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