The Thorens project

As I told you in my introduction page I am a bit of a music bug. Part of the joy of listening to music is the equipment involved in it, so I was glad to inherit the old Thorens TD 160 turn table from my father.

I know, why would you be playing vinyl records when there is YouTube and Spotify? Well the reason is plain simple: I rather listen to bad music in an enjoyable quality than enjoyable music in a bad quality and, sorry friends, to put it boldly the quality of the streaming services is plain bad!

Mistreated by 4 brothers (when mummy and daddy where not at home) who didn't think much of daddy's stereo set but to play Deep Purple or the Who as loud as possible, to say the Thorens was in a bit of a sorry state is an understatement. The belt had loosened so much that it took forever for the platter to take speed, the cell was wasted and the suspension of the subplatter was, for a lack of a better word, a bit wobbly. Playing records on it sounded much the same as scratching your nails on a blackboard.

I knew of a bloke in the Netherlands that restored and CLA'ed old record players but apart from the distance involved he is also retired and now he asks big money for every CLA he does and the price of restoration would be twice the price you can find a TD 160 in good condition second hand.

I always had it in my mind to do the CLA myself, even found a website of how to do it, but never could get myself to it, mostly because I am not the most handy of people.

Well (roll drums) I finally did it and now I can share it with you!

This is before CLA: sound is plain bad, almost no lows, distorted highs and muffled mids. Old Ortofon cell still mounted (more than 30 years of service - about time to retire it.)

Platter removed. The old belt (not shown) will be replaced with a new one. Unfortunately Thorens doesn't make any spare parts anymore for the TD 160 (until 5 years ago they still did.) Had to resolve with an OEM one of the bay. New cell (ortofon 2M red) already installed and that was a mistake since I would have to remove the tone arm.

The insides of the Thorens. One of the things I technically didn't need to do was adding several layers of bitumen latex (I found a can of bitumen spray in an car center) which would add weight to the sub platter while muting resonance coming from the metal. This would add to the sonic quality but meant I would have to remove the sub platter.

For removing the sub platter I also needed to remove the tone arm. The springs and bolts were also thoroughly polished (they were a bit rusty but other than that in very good condition.)

Bitumen dyed sub platter and tone arm installed again. This alone took a full day of work, but I still have to level and calibrate it, but before I can do that I still needed to do one thing...

...because one common design flaw with most turn tables of this area is that the ground is soldered onto the pole of the left channel. I had to desolder everything and install some cinch male plugs and solder all cables onto it, meanwhile making sure I didn't solder the wrong cable to the wrong plug. First time I soldered anything. Tricky job, but I got it right first time round.

View from the back. I didn't find any plugs that were long enough so I had to resolve drilling the wholes in the wood a little larger. Ugly, but since this is the back I figured it's ok(-ish.)

Done! The least you can say is that the music is lively again and quite enjoyable. As I am typing this Randy Newman's "Born again" is playing and it's like he's giving a concert in my living room. Almost 50 years old and playing like new - try to do that with an iPhone...