SME 202 SME V tone-arm van den Hul Frog cartridge (Los Angeles, CA)

SME 202 SME V tone-arm van den Hul Frog cartridge

A great chance to buy one of the best turntable arm cartridge combinations in the world at a very reasonable price . The turntable seems to be in perfect working condition. It is quite dusty in places (especially under the platter) and has a few tiny spots of what look like brown paint (three I noticed - just to the right below the SME badge just below the arm attachment and to the right of the serial number plaque).The power supply seems to be the earlier model but appears faultless. The turntable serial number is 68 .The Series V arm is quite dusty when you look closely and could do with an expert clean for cosmetic reasons but seems to work perfectly. It has its polystyrene packing with various accessories - see the photo.The van den Hul Frog cartridge serial number is 18814-GC7I1 . It has its original case.After I transported it carefully from the owner s to my house I set it up to test it. That was harder than I thought it would be because my amp doesn t have an MC input and I ended up having to buy a Lentek pre-amp and then digging out my old Armstrong amp because the Lentek had a 5-pin DIN plug. To make things even harder the Armstrong (not used for 20 years) kept on tripping the rather too sensitive new RCD in my mains supply. But it was worth the extra bit of work because the end results were stunning. The LPs I tried aren t absolutely pristine so there was a fair amount of surface noise - there s obviously nothing any turntable arm cartridge can do about that but the quality of the audio the incredible dynamic range the life-likeness of live recordings and the spaciousness of the soundstage were an eye-opener. I began to see why people pay this sort of money for something to play records.