I recently acquired an old 1972 1202 in decent condition, and after some cleaning and wood repairs to the plynth, appears to be nearly new! all the functions work fine, the motor gets up to speak fine, the auto functions of the arm work fine, the records play at the right speeds.. but! the signal is very quiet and is accompanied by a loud but high-to-mid pitched hum. And the sound is only coming from one speaker. I have attached the 1202 to a modern amp by using a 5pin DIN to phonos adaptor (admittedly a cheap one, as I wanted to know if the record player worked before forking out on a proper one from Sounds Heavenly). When the amp is cranked right up, we can hear the record playing fine, with no distortion, so I think the cartridge (an SP14) and the stylus are both fine. I am thinking it must be a minor problem with the output - perhaps the wire itself or the connections inside. Can anyone shed any light on this for me?

Thanks

George

1. Does your amp have a built in phono stage (RIAA?) If not, that accounts for the very quiet sound - probably sounds a bit bass light too!

2. You need an earth wire from the casing of the DIN plug to the earth of the amplifier.

1.The quietness is down to the lack of RIAA. The missing channel is either the cartridge - not so likely on an SP14 in my experience - or a dodgy connection either in the DIN plug or a dodgy adapter.

2. Earhing the DIN will do this - good adapters have an extra earth wire. Run any wire between the chassis of the Beogram and an earth on the amplifier as a test and you should hear that the hum goes.

This is the adapter that came with a BG3404.  Note the ground wire.

Ok.. update time.. I bought a RIAA amp - this has given me volume. Thanks Doctor!

And I've earthed the turntable - this has got rid of the hum in the good channel. Thank you for that pic Rich.

However, one of the channels is still not producing sound, and a lot of hum. If I unplug the speaker thats carrying that channel, the sound is pretty good (albeit just half the signal!). So would it be safe to assume it's a wiring fault within the turntable, or the DIN plug, or the adaptor?

And although the sound is quite good, it's quite muffled and lacking high-mids and high freqs. Is this just going to be the quality I should expect from a 35 - 40 year old record player? Or could it be due to the crap leads? Or could it be the cartridge is not as it once was?

Thanks