Not the best pictures, but here’s one of our vintage systems that took a few years to acquire. Two turntables- a Gale GT2101 turntable with SME II Improved/Shure V15, and a Transcriptors Skeleton with Vestigal arm/ADC XLM Mk II, Lecson AC1 Preamplifier, Lecson FM1 tuner, Lecson AP3 II power amplifier (the cylinder) all feeding Gale GS401 speakers. England 1978 personified. We’re presently redesigning the Gale’s speed controller.
As a very long time Quad owner, (and knowing the stir it will cause) I believe this system comes as close to sounding like a Quad 57 with higher output and more bass- far better than any subwoofer augment with a ribbon tweeter. Ira Gale spent many months trying to emulate their performance and succeeded to large degree using some rotgut AR-type woofers, a Peerless midrange, and Celestion tweeter. Very amplifier specific due to its low impedance resulting from the woofers being wired in parallel.
Many of the design concepts embodied in the Gale turntable have been copied ad nauseum and claimed as “firsts”, which is entertaining to see.
J. Gordon Holt sandbagged the Vestigal arm years ago, but it still works great and damn well on its original thread.
Many may not remember Lecson, but the principals went on to form Meridian. Stan Curtis replaced them after bankruptcy and updated their amplifiers and added a tuner. They won many design awards including being in a recent Victoria & Albert exhibition. I’ve created the www.lecsonaudio.com and www.galeaudio.com websites in order to preserve information on these two brands.
Here’s the Transcriptors Skelton turntable with Vestigal Arm. Iit’s mounted on a bulletproof B-17 aircraft window; I intentionally shattered one of the internal layers to get the “effect”. I have another one under the Gale turntable.
I also have an original first generation Philips/Magnavox CD player without mods, used to compare against current generation CD/DAC combos.
