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Roll your own plinth
I realized after Terry Cain and I were done that the final design turned out to be too complicated for most people to make. But I want to fulfill my promise of everyman plans so you can roll your own plinth. Here then are some diagrams to help you get going, courtesy of Pete Riggle and his drafting table. Pete's working on his own Garrard plinth design after having been infected with the Garrard virus during the project. Be forewarned that the 301G virus is extremely contagious! Thanks to Pete's diagrams, you should be able to get some basic ideas, dimensions and a path forward to get started. In the adjoining photograph, you can see a conceptual drawing Pete did for a Garrard plinth. In this drawing Pete depicts a plinth with a sculpted motor cutout and a removable arm board with the dimensions of 550mm (21.65 inches) wide, 440mm (17.32 inches) deep, and 140mm (5.51 inches) high. Pete also drew a conceptual drawing for a laminated plinth using three layers with cutouts for the motor assembly with similar dimensions.

Once you have a basic idea of how you want to approach your plinth, you can lay it out on a sheet of cardboard. Using your Garrard as a template, trace around it as a starting point and then figure out where to place the tonearm using the tonearm template for your particular tonearm. If you want to use two tonearms, you can draw that into the template as well. Once you have done that, fine-tune depth and width. Now build a mockup from cardboard and Styrofoam to make sure everything fits properly and to determine the height dimension you prefer. After you've signed off on your mockup and made sure everything works like you want it to, you can make your plinth out of your favorite hardwood. That's pretty much it. Good luck and be sure to share your results with me!


Speed control
While reviewing the excellent KAB Speed Strobe, I found out that my Garrard 301 was running 0.6% fast, about double the broadcast standard and too fast to correct by using the Garrard's own speed control knob. For a listener, this speed error means that notes are reproduced as slightly sharp. I used my Variac to drop the voltage from 120 to 110 at which point I was able to get the motor back into the range where the table's speed control could fine-tune the final speed. I was able to adjust the 301 to 0.03% accuracy, an order of magnitude better than the broadcast standard.

I checked with Jonathan Halpern about my speedy table and he told me the following. "All 301s except for one in my experience have run fast. There is a story behind that. The 301 uses an induction motor as opposed to the more common A/C synchronous motors found in most tables. Induction motors change their torque depending on voltage applied. Garrard supplied about 6 different pulleys depending on your actual wall voltage. When you purchased a 301, you would check the speed and then return your pulley with the amount of adjustment needed. They would then send you a proper sized pulley back." I told Jonathan about using a Variac and he explained that "using the Variac is a simple way to get it up and running but it doesn't sound as good as using a properly sized pulley because it reduces motor torque to obtain proper speed. The best way to adjust the speed is either to bring the pulley to a machine shop and have it turned in a trial and error way -- reduce and check, reduce and check -- or, easier and cheaper, hold an emery board or 1000-grit sandpaper square to the pulley with the motor on. This will gently machine down the brass pulley. You can do a little bit at a time and recheck the speed. If you are at 110v for accurate speed, then you're very close. Probably 10 minutes of sanding and you'll be all set. The 301 can run from 100v to 130v or 200v to 250v. Lots of pulley sizes are needed to cover such a wide range. You obviously have a pulley that was sold to a guy in a 110V location." So there you have it, straight from Jonathan, a very practical way of getting the right speed from your pulley. However, another reader wrote in to tell me that in his experiments, he found the motor to sound better when run from a Variac. I'll do a little filing on the pulley and report back to you on the results. "To Variac, or not to Variac - that is the question!"

All together now
Okay, now that I had everything together in a working turntable, I was wondering how much I had invested in my little project. My guess is you're probably wondering about it, too. Let's see what the tally sheet reads. Starting from scratch, the price for everything but the tonearm came to $2157. If you throw in the Origin Live-modded RB250 (a great combination by the way), you'd be looking at about $2500 for a complete Garrard 301 turntable just like the one I built. Not bad but certainly not pocket change. Let's say you don't want to spend that much. You could lay out the design of motor plus arm(s) on a single-piece top-plate of birch ply with three wooden dowels for legs for less than $100 in materials. You could probably bring it in for $1250 complete sans arm. My guess is, it would sound very good.


Musings and listening
I got out of vinyl about fifteen years ago and went digital -- stupid I know -- but frankly, digital had gotten so much better and was so easy to use that I settled comfortably into the format. I was reminded that vinyl had superior sound & music-playing ability every time I listened to Stephæn Harrell's Nottingham Space Deck & Space Arm in comparison to his digital front ends. In my opinion, it wasn't even a close race. It was apparent that vinyl was the thoroughbred and digital the Clydesdale. A Clydesdale is great for hauling beer to the masses -- an important role to be sure -- but it just doesn't have the performance of an Arabian for the enthusiast. Even knowing this dreary fact, I just couldn't get excited about getting back into vinyl, as much as I enjoyed the sonic prowess of turntables like the Brinkman, the Linn LP12, Terry O'Sullivan's Loricraft Audio Garrard 501, the Nottinghams and the Teres, all of which I recommend to music lovers and musicians for the way they handle the notes.


Then that rascal Jules Coleman sent me a photo of a Shindo Garrard 301 player system that pushed me over the vinyl precipice. I had never even heard of a Shindo-anything, backwoods Pacific Northwest boy that I am, and I knew I couldn't afford it even though I lusted after it. That's when the idea for a roll-your-own 301 for the audio-everyman was born and is now fulfilled in the Garrard Project you see on these pages. I love it! So what does the full vintage experience with Garrard 301, SME 3012 tonearm and Denon 103 cartridge sound and feel like? Fabulous!

I pulled out a few of my favorite jazz LPs to listen to and cued up Chet Baker's Chet first. Chet, recorded in sessions during 1958 and 1959, remains my favorite Chet Baker album and my favorite example of the laid-back West Coast style of jazz. Bill Evans is on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Pepper Adams on baritone saxophone, Herbie Mann on flute, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones & Connie Kay doing the drumming, all backing Chet Baker on trumpet in quartets to sextets on this remarkably beautiful set of ballads. I dropped the needle on the first track, "Alone Together", and was treated to a Bill Evans lead-in to provide the backdrop for Chet Baker's smooth and melodic trumpet intro. Pepper Adam's richly burnished baritone sax and his rough-textured playing provide contrast to the light shimmer of the cymbals for a thoroughly hypnotic number. I could feel myself relaxing into the music and flowing with the notes as I was carried away by Chet's phrasing.


The Garrard fills the room with a big, billowing sense of space that extends well outside the location of the speakers, with a deep soundstage that retains naturally sized images that are infused with the breath of life-like humanness. One of the things I've noticed -- and Terry Cain commented on it too -- is that the Garrard has a definite sense of drive & PRaT (pace, rhythm and timing) that brings the music to life. Paul Chamber's bass playing on "Alone Together" has a sense of tautness, propulsion & rhythmic nuance that completely escapes my very fine $8000 Meridian 508.20/Audio Logic 2400 transport/DAC combination. A number of Garrardissimos I have talked to contribute this to the idler wheel design. I don't know if it's the idler wheel or not but the Garrard 301 has the PRaT thing down pat in the best of the English tradition. It's easy to understand why such a great mystique has grown up around the Garrard 301 after spending some time with it. It really is an incredible table.


There is rich musicality to the music produced by the Garrard 301. It conveys the mood of the music in fine fashion and with a great sense of correct tonality. Simply put, the Garrard 301 is a tone monster! It's also a rhythm king. You'll always understand the intricacies of the rhythm with this vintage setup. Think of the boring beat of that one-note metronomic bass line that you hear in many recordings with most tables. It's there but it's not much of an inspiration. The Garrard 301 takes that seemingly one-note bass line and infuses into it the musicians' subtle (or not so) stylings in tempo, dynamics, phrasing and harmonic structure to give it feeling. And guess what? The Garrard doesn't just do that with bass, it does it with all the instruments and voices that make up the musical whole to produce a very cohesive & life-like musical experience that oozes emotions.


The Garrard also gives a sense of natural burnished warmth and solidity to images. The Garrard conveys the texture of all the components of the music and makes sense of the musical whole. It's also detailed in a very natural-sounding and realistic way. The vintage setup is easy on the ear and has no unnatural edge or glare. On "September Son", Kenny Burrell's guitar intro opens the song and provides the backdrop for when Chet comes in with his trumpet. The two continue to lazily style through the rest of the number. With the Garrard, you get a real feel for the music. You don't just hear the music and admire the sound, you get a glimpse into the emotional makeup of the musicians contributing to it. You understand the music in a way that few other source components can match.


While I was writing this part of the article, I listened to LPs through the afternoon with bright spring sunlight streaming through the windows, to late into the night with my listening room dimly lit by the glow of vacuum tubes. Chet streamed by as did Bill Evans' Waltz for Deb, and Miles Davis' Cookin' and Doc & Merle Watson Pickin' the Blues. There was Gene Ammons' Soulful Moods of Gene Ammons and the Tony Bennett & Bill Evans album, and Curtis Counce's You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce and Count Basie's Farmers Market Barbeque and ... well you get the idea. When I was done for the night, I was edified, relaxed and had a sense of fulfillment & restoration of my musical soul much like I get when playing my guitar - an ultimate compliment to the Garrard.


Wrapping up
I've had a blast getting the Garrard 301 up and running and playing music. I haven't had so much fun with audio in years! I've enjoyed the Garrard so much that I haven't purchased a single CD since I started spinning licorice discs. Mind you, I'll still buy CDs because there's a lot of good music that is only available on CD but when I really want to indulge my musical Jones, it'll be on the 301.

So how good is a Garrard 301? I'll let Pete's words speak to that point from a listening session over at Terry Cain's. "(The music) ... got really good when we got to Jeff Day's Garrard 301. The Garrard 301 with the Cain & Cain plinth were out of this world. I was in the foyer when the stylus hit the groove and my mind just blew!"


The Garrard plays music in an entirely engrossing fashion. The Garrard 301 has what I call accurate musicality, my term for describing that rare piece of equipment that brings to life the full emotive and artistic palette of a piece of music and sounds good in the traditional HiFi sense -- of imaging, soundstaging, tonality, separation of musical lines, pace, rhythm, and timing etc. -- while doing it. The Garrard 301 plays music that both feels right and sounds right. It's truthful to the tone and it gets the rhythm right. I feel good after listening to music through it, and the way it handles the notes allows stress to melt away just like a good massage does - in this case a musical massage of the soul. The idler wheel Garrard 301 is truly the single-ended-triode of the turntable world and it's probably no coincidence that SET luminaries like Ken Shindo and Don Garber have 301s feeding their SETs at home.


What's next?
Tonearms, phono stages and cartridges are up next. It turns out that the Garrard 301 is very revealing of ancillaries. The music just keeps getting better as I find that perfect match of gear. I'm just beginning to explore the lofty musical heights that are attainable with the Garrard 301. Don Garber has sent his Fi Yph for review, which I'll combine with the incredible Auditorium 23 moving coil step-up transformer for the Denon 103 . Yoshi at 47Labs has sent the Shigaraki phono stage, a new 47 Labs cartridge and the OTA Cable Kit for review. Ed Sheftel, the US importer, has sent the Tom Evans Audio Design Groove + phono stage for review. I'll be giving you the full scoop on each of these pieces of gear in their own stand-alone reviews and as a survey as part of my next Garrard Project article. Did I mention that Keith Aschenbrenner of Auditorium 23 has a surprise treat coming in for review as well? I can't wait! Stay tuned!


Terry Cain is building Pete a plinth from solid Cherry for his Garrard 301 so I'll be able to comment about the effect of wood choice on sonics and music-playing ability. Terry says he's also game for comparing the sonics of a thicker top plate to the original one so I'll have more to say about that aspect, too. I'll also report back on the difference in sound between using a Variac versus filing down the pulley by hand to dial in the speed for the 301.


Thanks!
Srajan tells me that The Garrard Project Part 2 has become one of the most anticipated follow-up articles on 6moons based on reader inquiries. Thanks to all for being patient with me. Part 2 took a lot longer to get finished up and written than I had anticipated, due to complications caused by non-audio factors. I'd like to thank our readership that has e-mailed me expressing enthusiasm for the Garrard Project series of articles. For those of you who have been e-mailing me to share your own Garrard projects, I've enjoyed your photos & Garrard wisdom immensely and you are sure to be an inspiration to Garrardians everywhere. Keep them coming!


A lot of work went into the Garrard Project through a lot of folks. I'd like to take a moment to thank them all for their great ideas and help getting my personal Garrard up and running. I literally couldn't have done it without their help and guidance. In alphabetical order, I'd like to thank Terry Cain for making me an everyman's plinth for under a grand and mounting the tone arms. Thanks to Jonathan Halpern for great advice and guidance as an all-around Garrard guru and the loan of his classic SME 3012 tonearm. I'd like to thank my friend and neighbor Stephæn Harrell for loaning me his personal Monolithic Sound phono stage and helping me mount cartridges and get them adjusted & generally everything else dialed in. Many thanks to Pete Riggle for loaning his personal Origin Live-modified Rega RB250 tonearm with Denon 103 cartridge for tonearm comparisons and installing a VTAF so we could make quick tonearm swaps for said tonearm comparisons. Many many thanks to Mel at Origin Live for loaning me one of their exquisite Silver tonearms and being so patient with me as the Garrard Project is idle-wheeling much longer than I anticipated.