A Creative Demo

A good customer of ours reached out to us to re-mount his Reed 2P which was mis-mounted by the manufacturer of his turntable.  The Reed is not without it’s quirks, but this was compounded by the mounting error. 

In part-2 we describe some of those quirks, and the workarounds we developed.

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 was interested in both our Savoie turntable and a Kuzma tonearm, and we began to plan a strategy for putting on a meaningful demo for him.  When you come to Galibier for an audition, be prepared for a marathon session if multiple arm and cartridge swaps are on the agenda.

The Demo Strategy

The initial strategy was straightforward:  compare his Reed 2P and Lyra Atlas on both his turntable and then on the Savoie.   The next step involved mounting a Kuzma and his Lyra on both turntables.

Well, best laid plans and all that, his turntable requires a longer mounting distance than the specification for the Kuzma 4Point-9 and 4Point-11.   Ultimately, this became the genesis of our Hybrid Kuzma project.

Remounting the Reed 2P

Two issues went unnoticed when the Reed was initially mounted – issues which required a bit of creativity to correct.

The first problem was a “mis-specified” pivot to spindle length.  At the specified mounting distance, we ran out of adjustment range for a Baerwaald alignment with his Lyra cartridge. 

We established a workable mounting distance to facilitate both Baerwaald and Löfgren geometry and re-mounted the arm.  We then encountered a VTA range issue whose resolution we cover in detail in part-2.  The Reed’s mounting (in)flexibility requires a much taller armboard than is typical for most current turntables (what are you thinking, Reed?)

Back to the Savoie – Mounting the Reed

Returning to the Savoie, 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 block was 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 about – some quick work in our basic shop to get the job done – this, rather than wait days/weeks for our machinist. 

A day in the life … the second part of this saga can be found here.