If you’re a record geek, then you may have seen me spinning old vinyl on my main machine, a 1960s-era EMT 930st turntable.
I bought my house from an old guy who worked at NBC in Burbank for thirty-five years. The old man was a hoarder of great and exotic vintage electronic things. He told me that he was in charge of the obsolescence program at NBC. When things reached first-stage obsolescence, he moved them to a back-room storage area. When they reached second-stage obsolescence, he moved them to an off-site storage facility. When they reached third-stage obsolescence, he was supposed to throw them away. The only thing is (and this old guy was a guy after my own heart), when they reached third-stage obsolescence, he simply brought these things home.
When I bought my house from the guy, he gave me about five van loads of his own personal third-stage-obsolescence items—tubes, transformers, studio racks, connectors, speakers, and tons and tons of service bulletins and instruction manuals. At the time, he told me he had taken all the stuff “he still needed” out to his daughter’s place in Arizona. He also told me he was really disappointed he had never managed to steal—er, “obsolete”—an entire mixing console. He chuckled and said, “I came pretty close.”
When the old man passed away, a few years after I bought the house, his daughter let me know there were approximately one hundred large boxes of her dad’s “good stuff” that she wanted to sell me. We worked out a deal, and I went out to Arizona to survey what was there. RCA microphones, vintage microphone stands, mic preamplifiers, tube power amplifiers, vintage rack equalizers and compressors and boxes of everything that an electronic hoarder would need for the next ten lifetimes—parts and parts and parts galore. I loved this old guy, we were two peas in a pod. He just loved collecting and hoarding cool stuff. He had boxes of things like vintage ballpoint pens—and they would be the COOLEST ballpoint pens you ever saw. He had little cigar boxes of just about everything you could imagine. Even to this day, whenever I need something, I go through the boxes in my storage, and sure enough, the old man had a cigar box full of about sixty-five of them.
As we were loading up all the stuff in Arizona, the daughter said, “Somewhere around here, we have this old German turntable my dad was always talking about. We’ll give it to you when we find it.” German? Turntable? I figured it was a Dual, a fairly common German brand sold in the United States back in the 1960s and 1970s. I forgot about it.
A few years later, the daughter contacted me again: “We found that old German turntable—and we’ll bring it to LA on our next trip. Meet us at the Trader Joe’s parking lot in Granada Hills.” I dutifully met them in the TJ’s parking lot, and loaded the box into my van. I didn’t even look at it until I got home.
I opened the box and, well, unglaublich!!! It was an EMT 930st. I had never seen one in the flesh. Many people think it’s the best turntable ever made (lots of debate on that subject, especially from the modern guys who pay “new car money” for turntables that look like something from a steampunk science project. But as far as “vintage turntables” go, the EMT 930st is considered just about the best turntable ever made.
It’s not beautiful, unless you like hammertone-gray industrial pieces of electronic equipment (guilty!). It’s as heavy as a fridge and totally manual—there is no apparatus for automatic stuff like you’d find on a record “changer,” the sort of record player we all grew up with. No, it’s just a ridiculously overbuilt piece of German technology, built with impeccable tolerances and the best bearings and a super-quiet motor and a built-in phono preamp module (in case you’re a real snob, mine is the 155st—wouldn’t that have been something if this one had a 139b, but it didn’t).
These things were made to put in radio stations and last forever. I’m not sure why NBC in Burbank ordered a bunch of these in the late 1960s, but they did, probably based on their reputation. One interesting thing is that NBC ordered their EMT turntables with a standard American square four-pin connector (as opposed to the European “diamond” connector), so they could use easier-to-find American phonograph cartridges instead of the precious and rare EMT cartridges.
Well, okay then. I had myself the Cadillac of phonographs, or perhaps more accurately, the Mercedes-Maybach of phonographs. The sucker didn’t work, and I had to figure out how to make it work. That’s where the fun part came in.
Nobody knows how to work on these things. The parts aren’t manufactured anymore. Even fifteen years ago when I first acquired the EMT turntable, everything was very difficult to locate (you had to order parts from Germany), and what little knowledge there was about restoration and repair was limited to posts on snobby hi-fi audio forums. When I first got the turntable, I special-ordered an EMT cartridge (with a custom American four-pin square connector), a new rubber idler wheel, a rubber damper for the cast phono base, and a few other items, including the mysterious “EMT Oil” that is specified in the manual in very strong language: “DO NOT USE ANY OTHER TYPE OF LUBRICANT THAN EMT OIL!!” I’m still not sure if EMT Oil is magical oil or actual snake oil, but they charge you fifty dollars for a little bottle that holds about two whiskey shots’ worth.
Since I had the manual (and even all the original factory paperwork) for this turntable, I was able to get the machine up and running. And true to form, it’s been faithful and reliable for fifteen years. Turn it on, it works. Sounds great. I have loved this machine for its simplicity and fine sound.
A few months ago, the turntable started running slow. I couldn’t figure out why. I tried cleaning and lubricating—regular maintenance stuff—but nothing seemed to help. I went online and was distressed to find that in the fifteen years since I had been gifted the machine, some of the old EMT guys had passed away, parts had become even more difficult to obtain, and NO new parts had been made for years by any version of the EMT company. There is currently one older German gentleman selling new old-stock EMT parts, a situation that leaves a customer such as myself in a constant state of “Please sir, may I have another” while being spanked with an expensive Deutsch-paddle to obtain some Unobtanium that one is quite desperate to purchase.
In case you’ve ever wanted to fool around with old stuff, vintage junk, cool old things, let me illustrate the pain you’re in for. One of the items I ordered was a motor capacitor replacement kit. Replacing the motor capacitor reduces rumble in the motor, and since my motor capacitor was nearly sixty years old, I thought it would be a good idea to purchase a replacement kit. When I received the item, the instructions with the kit said to reference “section G of the manual” for how to install the motor capacitor and parallel matching capacitors for best results. Consulting my manual, I found that my manual only went up to section “F.” It was the original first edition from 1967. Looking online, I found a copy of the revised manual from the mid-1970s, but only in—wait for it—French. Using Google Translate, the motor capacitor section translated so strangely (c’est la vie!) that I sent an email the German man who sold me the motor capacitor kit. I let him know my original manual only went up to section “F” and could he please just take a cell phone photo of the “G” section so I could figure out how to install the motor capacitors correctly. His response reminded me of a certain Soup salesman on the Seinfeld show: “We are happy to sell you a copy of the revised manual for 55 euros plus 25 euros shipping.” Das ist doch wohl ein Witz!! Trust me, being gifted a 1967 EMT turntable is just as much a curse as it is a blessing, J just in case you’re thinking how “lucky” I was. You’ve got to be a real lover of pain to get this deep in the weeds on a piece of machinery.
Today was the first day I’ve had in months to sit out back on my workbench, the birds chirping, the sun shining, and a lovely breeze blowing through my back porch. I got the beast all apart and replaced the turntable ball bearing, the EMT Oil, the felt washers, the rubber idler wheel, the motor capacitor, and the rubber motor mounts, and cleaned everything I could. It took a while, but darn it, every threaded part threaded perfectly—zero tolerance. Every bearing cleaned up and soaked in the mysterious EMT Oil. The rubber parts didn’t even look that bad, but I replaced them with brand-new rubber parts. I put it all back together and held my breath.
It fired right up. Turns at exactly 33 1/3 rpm. Speed is rock solid on 45 rpm and 78 rpm too. Sounds great. Ready for another fifteen years of blasting vinyl records and making my neighbors wonder what kind of idiot plays hillbilly music followed by the Ramones followed by doo-wop and then some vintage 1960s soul. I just hope that in fifteen years, I’ll still be able to order the expensive little parts from the cold and brutal older German man on the internet.
And if you’re thinking of buying a turntable, I’d just get some good old funky Japanese thing from the 1980s. Do you really want all this headache? Leave that to masochists like me, okay?
See more photos and videos at Deke’s original post.
