Marantz Model 6200 Turntable.

Toolfan66

A neighbor of ours is moving, my wife said she came over and dump this off said if I wanted great if not throw it away, LOL..

Well is it worth cleaning up? It’s actually in pretty decent shape except the dust and dirt, I haven’t plugged it in or anything, I literally just came home to it. 😎

mhardy6647

I had a dump find 6100, which I gave to a friend of our daughter's long ago.
They are both, I am pretty sure, made by CEC, and they're perfectly decent.
The marantz tts of that era go for stoopit money... because... you know... marantz.

oldrocker

Congrats.

Looks nice to me, the price was certainly right.

pitdogg2

Lucky bad word bad word

txcoastal1

mhardy6647 wrote: »

I had a dump find 6100, which I gave to a friend of our daughter's long ago.
They are both, I am pretty sure, made by CEC, and they're perfectly decent.
The marantz tts of that era go for stoopit money... because... you know... marantz.

Do you know if you can keep headshell and just replace the stylus?

mhardy6647

The headshells are completely interchangeable.
You can install the Pickering cartridge that's on the Sansui headshell into the Marantz headshell, if that is what you are asking.
I can't tell exactly which cartridge model that is, but 'generic' replacement Pickering styli of good quality should be available from any good cartridge/stylus supplier (if you need a new stylus).
I believe the offset should be the same for either headshell, although an alignment protractor (you can buy a nice one or print one from the internet) could be used as well.
Do you have the manual for the 6200?
If not, it is probably on www.vinylengine.com Free registration required to download. If you have any trouble registering, send me a PM and I can help you get the manual if you need one (and, of course, if it is there).
EDIT: It is indeed: https://www.vinylengine.com/library/marantz/6200.shtml

So... the Marantz manual says to use an alignment mark on the Marantz 45 rpm adaptor for setting stylus overhang. Do you have the original spindle?

If not, and/or if you don't have or want to get a protractor (which can be a very simple printed "jig" that has alignment marks to use -- and instructions), I think that arm and headshell should use the "standard" 52 mm offset. Technics supplied a little plastic jig to use to align the stylus properly, but you can do it, carefully, with a decent ruler.



The Marantz manual has pretty simple and clear instructions on all aspects of installing, balancing and aligning a cartridge, as well as setting VTF. The little wires that attach to the cartridge are rather fragile (more to the point, the little slip-on connectors for the cartridge's pins are a bit touchy) if you're not used to installing these things(?).

msg

That's a pretty cool turntable, Larry. Got some neat features on it that'd be fun to check out.

mhardy6647

It is quite a bit upscale from the aforementioned, bare-bones 6100. Full auto... not something one sees every day in a tt, even from that era!

I would think that it should be a good, reliable daily driver kind of tt without undue effort.

Emlyn

If everything works on it and it's cleaned up cosmetically it could be worth a few hundred bucks. I wouldn't mind having one just because it's an alternative to the run of the mill Technics tables. It's also appealing to some because of the fully automatic features and repeat function. Dark Side of the Moon side two on endless repeat?

msg

If only there were a way to skip the beginning of Time on that album...

So the repeat function is for a side, not a track? I was wondering how this worked.

This reminds me, I think I'm due for a lazy Sunday's worth of record tinkering. Got some cleaning to do, carts to mount (@jdjohn), and that last tertiary task. You know, listening.

jdjohn

And I think your gear already works, @msg, so just need to mount and align.

mhardy6647

jdjohn wrote: »

And I think your gear already works, @msg, so just need to mount and align.

Man, that would be a bad phrase to take out of context.

jdjohn

mhardy6647 wrote: »

I had a dump find 6100, which I gave to a friend of our daughter's long ago.
They are both, I am pretty sure, made by CEC, and they're perfectly decent.
The marantz tts of that era go for stoopit money... because... you know... marantz.

CEC made tt's for several companies, and they are all generally decent. Thing is: you can buy a vintage Realistic CEC-made tt for a couple hundred less than, say, this Marantz CEC-made tt.

pitdogg2

jdjohn wrote: »

mhardy6647 wrote: »

I had a dump find 6100, which I gave to a friend of our daughter's long ago.
They are both, I am pretty sure, made by CEC, and they're perfectly decent.
The marantz tts of that era go for stoopit money... because... you know... marantz.

CEC made tt's for several companies, and they are all generally decent. Thing is: you can buy a vintage Realistic CEC-made tt for a couple hundred less than, say, this Marantz CEC-made tt.

Well ATI (Amplifier technologies inc) made amps for lots of people, Outlaw, Theata and monoprice to name a few. All were built to price point standards. I'm sure all those TT guts are not the same. I could be wrong.

mhardy6647

jdjohn wrote: »

mhardy6647 wrote: »

I had a dump find 6100, which I gave to a friend of our daughter's long ago.
They are both, I am pretty sure, made by CEC, and they're perfectly decent.
The marantz tts of that era go for stoopit money... because... you know... marantz.

CEC made tt's for several companies, and they are all generally decent. Thing is: you can buy a vintage Realistic CEC-made tt for a couple hundred less than, say, this Marantz CEC-made tt.

Yup, thus my original "marantz" comment
That said, the OP is in the enviable position of having (as they say on AK) scroed a marantz, so... bonus!

CEC made tts to their customers' specs, but there was a pretty common look to them all -- just like the current crop of Hanpin and Ya Horng tts which are made for and sold by all kinds of 'big name' brands at all sorts of price points.

There's absolutely no shame in the CEC tts -- CEC was one of the go-tos for companies who didn't specialize or want to invest in their own tt line(s), but had to offer tts for (at least) the US market. Yamaha's mid 1970s tts, by all appearances, were CEC OEM, e.g.



I do thoroughly agree that the best bang for the buck are the CEC tts with off-brand names. Some of the "better" (and much beloved, in some circles) R/S "Realistic" tts were almost certainly of CEC proveance. R/S stuff, though, IMO is overpriced on the current, nostalgia market for what it is (just like marantz ).

mhardy6647

On the same topic, there were some very large (even huge) Japanese (and other) OEMs that made amps and receivers for many, many more or less popular brand names for the US market. Some, of course, were big names in their own right (Hitachi, Sanyo, Sharp, Pioneer, Kenwood/TRIO, and NEC, e.g.).

Planet Research and Automatic Radio are two of the fairly important OEMs that weren't well known as such on the US market. Automatic Radio, IIRC (and I am too lazy to check!) made the marantz receivers of the Superscope era and/or somehow became part of the marantz brand. Many of the later Sherwood-branded products were made by Inkel of Korea. Foster (Fostex) is also reputed to have been an important OEM for hardware (not just speaker drivers) BITD. Many of JC Penney's products were thinly (if at all) disguised Matsushita/Panasonic/Technics products -- although sometimes unique ones.

Sankyo (not Sanyo) built many, many OEM cassette decks (or, at least, the transports used in others' decks) -- as did Nakamichi (especially in the early days of hifi cassettes). Indeed, there are myriad Nakamichi 500 OEMs under other brand names (and sometimes with markedly varied cosmetics) that, back then and perhaps(?) even now, were a cheaper way to get what was at the time one of the best two-head cassette decks extant. Ironically, later in their history, Nakamichi's cheaper (at least) decks had Sankyo innards.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave...

a Sonab Nak 500:

Sonab C500 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr

and a Nakamichi with Sankyo innards: