We’re remounting a Reed 2P tonearm for a good customer of ours. The ‘table is from another manufacturer and the individual who mounted it apparently didn’t understand the Reed’s many quirks which I describe in part-2.
I can’t begin to tell you how many $30k to $60K turntable mounts I’ve had to correct – mounts which were off by several millimeters!
The Story
Our customer is interested in both our Eiger turntable and a Kuzma tonearm, so we got to thinking about how best to put a meaningful demo together for him. When you come to Galibier for an audition, drink plenty of coffee because we’ll frequently go through multiple arm/cartridge swaps during an extended day spent with us.
The Demo Strategy
The initial strategy was obvious: to compare his Reed 2P and Lyra Atlas on both his turntable and the Eiger. Similarly, we intended to mount a Kuzma with his Lyra – on both his turntable as well as an Eiger.
Well, best laid plans and all that, his turntable doesn’t have sufficient clearance under the armboard to mount either a Kuzma 4Point-9 or 4Point-11.
Remounting the Reed 2P
We returned to the Reed 2P mount (on his turntable) and we immediately encountered two compatibility issues with the Reed – issues which required a bit of creativity to install correctly.
The first problem was a “mis-specified” pivot to spindle length – one with which we could not achieve a Baerwaald alignment with his Lyra cartridge.
After resolving this, we were unable to adjust the arm for the correct VTA/SRA setting. We cover this in more detail in part-2 (mentioned at the beginning of this post).
Back to the Eiger – Mounting the Reed
Returning to the Eiger, we used the non-standard height of the Reed to our advantage.
Since we’re not in the habit of wasting a $700 armboard for an experiment, we got creative, and fabricated an aluminum spacer block to bolt onto the Kuzma armboard.
The was block mounted to the existing armboard using the Kuzma hole pattern (the three counterbored holes in the photo), and the Reed was then mounted to the block.
Surprisingly, this wasn’t quite tall enough, so we added another 5mm spacer and were in business.
The “machining” was nothing to write home to mom about – crude tools in the shop to get the job done – rather than wait days/weeks for our machinist.
A day in the life … the second part of this saga can be found here.
