The UPS man dropped off a few presents for me this afternoon. The first package was the bundle of The Thermals albums that I preordered from Sub Pop a while back. It includes
F---in A,
The Body, The Blood, The Machine, and
More Parts Per Million. I haven't taken the shrink off yet but they're pressed on colored vinyl. It should look pretty sharp. Truthfully, I'm just glad to have gotten the vinyl of any variation.
They also threw in the
No Culture Icons 7" and a few stickers, which was a nice bonus. I should order directly from labels more often.
The records are a great surprise and I look forward to listening to them but what really has my attention is the other package that the UPS delivery agent dropped off: a used Realistic LAB-420 turntable. I love my Technics SL1400 and SL1500 but I found a good deal and had to jump on it. I've been wanting to get a table with a wood plinth and auto-return for my living room rig. Even though it's just a veneer, I love how it looks.
I still need to clean it up and get it level. It'll make a good weekend project but before I adjust the feet, I want to get a new storage shelf for my records and get things set up on top of that (turntable, phono stage, headphone amp, headphone stands). I'll probably bribe my brother into taking me to Target to grab one tomorrow afternoon. In addition to that, I want to grab a tracking force gauge to make sure it's set properly. The cart I have on there now (Shure M97xe) wants 1.75g of tracking force with the brush down so I'd love to verify that with a scale.
Sorry for the dark, poorly composed photos. I forgot to grab my 18-55mm lens so I had to take them with my 50mm prime. I've got a broken leg so I had take the pictures from a seated position, which meant having to hold the camera above my head and avoid shaking long enough for the shutter to close. I'll be retaking the pictures once I get everything situated. I'll pull out the tripod for that occasion.
I listened to Peter Gabriel's
So (you can probably see part of his head on the lower portion of one of the pictures) and the table sounds great. I'll reserve full judgement until I do a thorough set up, though. The alignment and overhang all seemed to check out but I may still need to tweak a thing or two.
