Spin Doctor

They say that with age comes wisdom, and judging by some of my younger self's misguided choices, that adage could be true, at least for me. In 1984, after graduating from college with a degree in audio production, I moved back to England, where I had spent most of my teen years as a boarding school inmate. I had friends and connections there, and despite being a US citizen, I had some kind of sketchy work authorization that allowed me to work legally in the UK for up to six months. I connected with my old school friend Morris Gould, and we found a flat in South London to share as I looked for work.

Morris had been the de facto leader of my high school punk band, The Ripchords (footnote 1). Six years later, he was getting started with a career as ambient chill-out deejay Mixmaster Morris, releasing records as The Irresistible Force. Our apartment became a kind of hub in the South London music scene, with musicians and industry people circling through. Eventually, I found a job working at Music and Video Exchange, the gear-focused branch of the popular Record and Tape Exchange chain of secondhand record shops. At M&VE, the staff had first dibs on any cool gear that came in, and I remember being intensely envious when colleague Andy snagged a rare EMS VCS 3 synthesizer for almost nothing.

I got my share of goodies too, but in retrospect, I was rejecting all the really good vintage stuff and picking up things I really didn't need. Back then, I felt that vintage gear like Leak tube amps, Quad electrostatic speakers, and old idler-drive turntables were ancient history, appreciated only by old men with leather patches on the worn-out elbows of their tweed jackets whose pipes wafted Capstan Navy Cut Flake tobacco into the air.

Another way to find cool gear was through the pages of Exchange & Mart, a weekly local classified paper similar to the Pennysaver in the US (footnote 2). Every Thursday, I pored through the small ads, looking for gems I thought I needed while ignoring all that old fuddy-duddy stuff. Had I known better, I could have spent every Thursday driving around London in my little green Ford Fiesta, filling the boot with Garrard 301s for £25–£50 each, along with endless Radford, Leak, Quad, and Sugden tube gear for just a few quid. Back then, almost nobody wanted it. Oh how the times have changed.

Fast-forward about eight years, and I'm back in New York City, visiting Don Garber at his legendary but short-lived audio store, Fi, at 30 Watts Street in SoHo, the perfect address for an audio store if there ever was one. Fi was the epicenter of New York City's Triode Mafia DIY amp-designer scene, where people like Herb Reichert, J.C. Morrison, and Noriyasu Komuro hung out, showing off their latest bespoke flea-powered amplifier creations. As I sat there listening to some new tuned pipe speakers J.C. had built, I looked to my left and spotted high on a shelf a Garrard 301 turntable box. I asked Don about it. He told me that it was a new, never-opened oil-bearing model in the ivory finish, and it could be mine for just $700. I told Don he was dreaming and told him how cheap 301s were in London. But Don was older and wiser and had his finger squarely on the pulse of where things in the audio world were headed. I miss Don.

Today, Don's 301 would probably be worth $6000 or more. It is most likely sitting, still unopened, on the shelf of some collector in South Korea or Japan. Audiophiles in Asia appreciated the value of classic vintage European and American audio gear long before most of us in the West did, and a lot of the most desirable equipment made its way East many decades ago.

High-quality vintage idler-drive turntables like the Garrard 301 (and the follow-up 401) have shot up in value in recent years, as people learned to tame their eccentricities and maximize their strengths. In contrast to modern turntables, vintage idler drives like the Garrards, the Lenco L75, and the belt/idler hybrid Thorens TD 124 tend to be embraced mostly by hobbyists, who don't balk at (and likely relish) the prospect of fettling them into optimum condition and sourcing a suitable plinth and tonearm. There's also a small handful of manufacturers making modern idler-drive turntables, including Reed, Semper Sonus, Schick, and VPI (with its hybrid belt/rim drive option).

Another option is to buy a 301 or TD 124 that has already been fully sorted. Several companies do this work with varying levels of expertise and quality. A few years ago, Garrard itself stepped into the fray, showing just how far you can push things when you bring the engineering chops of companies like SME and Loricraft into the mix. The result—the 301 Classic—was impressive, as would be expected at the eye-watering price of $37,900.

In late 2018, Cadence Audio, which already owned English turntable and tonearm manufacturer SME, purchased the Garrard brand from a Brazilian company, Gradiente Electronics. In a separate deal, they purchased Loricraft, a British company with a long history of sorting 301s and developing their own licensed project, the Garrard 501. Loricraft also created the Loricraft record cleaner, which I reviewed in Spin Doctor #23. A few months later at the 2019 High End Munich audio show, we got to see the first fruits of these iconic British brands coming under a single umbrella, in the form of an attractively fresh-looking Garrard 301 Classic sitting in a corner of the SME stand. Was it entirely new? Was it a refurbished original? The SME representatives were being a bit coy. However, all was revealed later that year when my dear friend the late Art Dudley reviewed the 301 Classic in Listening #204, one of his final missives for Stereophile before he shuffled off this mortal coil. While it looked new, the 301 Classic was in fact an original Garrard 301 motor unit, exhaustively rebuilt with a few new parts mounted, in a new walnut plinth and paired with the SME M2-12R tonearm.

Fast-forward another four years. I was privileged to get an invite to visit the SME factory in south England and also had an opportunity to visit the home of Cadence Group owner Ajay Shirke, where I auditioned the Garrard 301 Classic for myself. While Shirke's system was unfamiliar, it extracted the best performance I had ever heard from a 301, seemingly curing all the traditional problems of vintage 301s with careful remanufacturing. Shirke told me then that the 301 Classic was just the start—that the next development, the 301 Advanced, would use a plinth made from the same Advanced Polymer Resin (APR) SME had been using for its Model 6 turntable. It would cost $54,500 with SME's VA-12 tonearm (footnote 3).

Writing a few months back in our sister magazine Hi-Fi News, Adam Smith described the 301 Advanced as "the audio equivalent of a new JIA Jensen Interceptor R, or an Eagle E-Type Jaguar." I get where Adam is coming from, but I don't think that analogy is entirely accurate. Those extraordinary cars are what's commonly known as restomods, extensively reworked with a host of judiciously applied modern upgrades but carefully preserving the oriinal car's classic style and panache. The 301 Advanced is more akin to a nuts-and-bolts–restored Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance winner built with painstaking effort to maintain originality so that it would be indistinguishable from Don Garber's new-old-stock 301 if you were to finally release it from its box after 65 years.

This 301 isn't loaded with modifications like a Buddah Bearing or a Longdog Audio quartz-locked power supply. It isn't that similar to the extensively modified 301 from Japan's Shindo Laboratory. Other than the plinth and arm, items which were always considered something you purchased separately to accompany your basic 301 motor unit, nothing here has changed from a stock 1960s Schedule 2 Garrard 301 with the oil bearing, optional strobe platter, and ivory paint finish.

Determining the age of the donor 301 used to create each 301 Advanced is tricky, because the restoration process involves assigning a new serial number. The review sample's serial number is G022, suggesting it's the 22nd one completed as part of this new endeavor. From the factory, 301s came with sequential numbers that went up to somewhere a little over 80,000. Early examples were called Schedule 1. They used a platter bearing lubricated with a grease fitting on the side of the platter-bearing housing. Much like the lube points on a car from the same era, you were supposed to force a little extra grease into the bearing occasionally by screwing in the grease fitting's knob. The manual didn't get more specific about what was meant by the word "occasionally," but they did supply a big tube of extra grease.

---

Footnote 1: Not to be confused with '80s New Wave band the Rip Chords, '60s hot-rod/surf band the Rip Chords, or '50s doo-wop band the Rip-Chords.

Footnote 2: Exchange & Mart was published back then by the same company that owned Hi-Fi News & Record Review. I wrote some reviews and articles for a shortlived spin-off called Audio & Video Mart.—John Atkinson

Footnote 3: Garrard, No.1 New Finches, Baydon Rd. Baydon, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 2XA, England. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 653199. Email: sales@sme.ltd.uk. Web: garrardturntables.co.uk. US distributor: Rhythm Distribution. Web: rhythmdistribution.com.