I really tried to quit buying TT, my attic is full and hey it's credit crisis, cash is king! But alas i got a mail from the local hifi shop owner about this TT. Needless to say i hurried to his shop and bought it for 40 euro. Some inmates at VA posted he should have paid me for taking this "total POS" off his hands! A controversial TT!
I already have the TT as it's identical to the 86SB. The reason i wanted this TT is the unique tone arm. As you can see there's a rod next to the arm tube that pulls the headshell outwards as the arm goes further towards the record label. The idea is to minimize the tracking error inevitable with pivoting tone arms. There were one or two similar arms but these are so obscure you'll never see them. This is the only mass produced TT with such a tone arm. Obvious disadvantage are the 4 horizontal bearings instead of 1! Plus a vertical bearing of course. A nice idea in theory but in the real world? Think of linear arms, the theoretically perfect way of record replay. Why are there so few of them?
I have no idea what the black curled wheel is for? No mention of it in the Vinyl Engine manual for the earlier model which is idler wheel drive. This one is belt drive. On the top front side of the see through plastic housing you see a metal slider which can be moved to set anti skating.
I sent an E-mail to TNT-Audio editor Lucio Cadeddu and go this answer: "Dear Freek,
in my opinion the wheel in the pic has to be used to fine adjust the way the turntable works in automatic mode, when playing a stack of records. Consider that for automatic replay of a stack of records one needed to put a kind of plastic pillar close to the adjusting wheel you mention. The original owner's manual I have doesn't mention it either. Hence, use the Zero in manual mode only and don't bother :-)"
An Ortofon OM10 cartridge with good looking and sounding stylus. A new Super OM10 will set you back 50 euro so it's almost worth the price for the whole TT. Alas IMHO it's not a good match. It's built pretty high so VTA is off, the tone arm is "bum down" so to speak. And compliance is high like most MM's. The "Rube Goldberg" arm construction is pretty heavy. Maybe i'll order a Nagaoka JT511DJ cart, i read a favourable thread about it on a German forum. It's dirt cheap and it's a low compliance MM!
As i wrote the TT is basically like the 86SB. Automatic but as usual i prefer manual operation. Nice easy arm lift.
Speed and record size selector switch.
The usual mechanical mess inside. The hifi shop owner had soldered a new external cable on it. Very nice but didn't he see the 2 RCA females? He could have just plugged a new RCA cable in! On the right the "synchro-lab" motor.The usual affair of a chunk of metal with a hole in the middle with 2 coils on either side. In the hole there's a round piece of metal with the spindle in the middle. Or actually 3 pieces of metal with 1 piece loose and rattling away on top of the other 2! Mmm some glue did the trick but the metal ring had holes drilled in it for balancing purposes. So now the motor isn't balanced anymore resulting in vibration and noise. It's better than it used to be but not as quiet as the 86 SB.
I cleaned the main bearing and stuffed it with grease. It's an inverted bearing, see the 86SB page. I took the new belt from the 86 SB. The 86 SB ran too slow and so seems this Zero 100! Mmm is it the grease in the bearing? The next day i cleaned the bearing again and used oil. Speed seems a little higher but now i hear a "woosh" sound in the main bearing. Sigh.
Despite the motor problems the rumble and noise level is tolerable. Of course i removed the shitty plastic bottom plate. Put it on 4 rubber pods or even better mount 4 spikes, one in every corner. And use it without bottom plate. Even better: make a heavy DIY birch multiply plinth like the idler wheel brigade does: Garrard 301/401, Thorens TD124, Lenco. Take the TT out of the hollow box, remove the springs and mount it on the new plinth as hard as you can. If you don't care about originality: remove all the mechanics you don't need for simple manual operation. Less is more.
First listening impressions are not bad. Timing is tight especially for a belt drive TT. Nice deep reverbs. I hear details in my test records i only hear with good TT. Alas there's some tracking distortion further up the record. Could be setup, the point is, can you use a normal 2 point protractor like the one that comes with the HFNRR test record? This arm is so unique it keeps you asking questions on the VA forum, questions often unanswered since it's so long ago for most users of this vintage TT. There's a favourable review on a somewhat tweaked Zero 100 SB on the TNT-Audio site, they even wrote 3pages about the old beast. OTOH when i posted about this TT on VA i got mostly HATE posts in reply, "total POS, mechanical disaster, stay away" etc. As usual the answer lies somewhere in the middle. It's not fair to compare this vintage TT with the 1000 euro + high end TT of today. Compared to other vintage TT in my collection: i've heard better but i've also heard worse. I've just scratched the surface with this TT, more money and elbow grease could lift it to a much higher level.