Dearest Friends!!! I am back and have prepared a SERIES of exciting hunting trips… VINYL-RELATED HIFI, DELICIOUS AND SHOCKINGLY WELL-KEPT CLASSIC TURNTABLES by the Japanese (as usual) for sale in a few great stores, and OF COURSE: vinyl records hunting and shopping in Japan!!! My wife and I landed in Japan on the 10th Jan, Sunday morning, and made our way to the 1st store which is really the best in terms of great used turntables!!… I can’t believe my eyes when I see that they check properly all the units, recondition them and offer them at great prices to the consumers PLUS offer 2-YEAR WARRANTIES for each of their turntables!!! 2-year warranties? for used tables that were 10, 20 years old? Gosh!!! :-D TICK!!! Alright alright… time to calm down and share them with all of you my friends!!! Taken time to video each and every trip out and will schedule them accordingly for your viewing pleasure, And to really let you feel the atmosphere, as if you are there on the ground, walking about and soaking in the sights and sounds, smells and feel of the places! Thank you to my dear wife too for following me around! Thank you to all of you my dear friends for allowing me and encouraging me to share the vinylphilia journeys with you. We will keep the Vinyl Dream alive, and keep the vinyl spinning my friends! Best Regards as always, Ian! ******* Dearest Friends and Buddies, I am Ian and I love our Vinyl Community and Vinyl Music. Vinyl analogue playback is utterly blissful, and I want for fellow friends and buddies to engage in vinyl music for many, many years in their life, each vinyl buddy through their school life, through the hustle and bustle of daily work, accompany them through precious hours at home with their family members or in their hostel with their friends. Vinyl music is blissful, free of time smear, phase shift, pre-ring and post-ring that plagues digital playback. Vinyl buddies and friends can all attest to that. It is not warm in the “bassy warm” sense, it is not soothing in the sense that “everything gets smoothed out”. It is because it is analogue, very detailed, calm, invigorating, enthralling, dynamic, refreshing. In a word, blissful. Utterly :-D I want for all to get the very equipment that will get us there. These equipment, I firmly believe, are present, and existent, even at affordable price points!..and I started off in Dec 2015 hunting out for them, selling off my own Rega RP6 (which my wife and I loved) to fund the first batch of cartridges for review: the 5 cartridges in Group A ($70-$80), and the 7 cartridges in Group B ($90-$130). Subsequently I told myself to set aside $500-$1000 per month from my monthly salary to buy equipment to review. My own money. Quite a hefty sum monthly, significant to me, as I am a salaried man. I know this is crazy. But I believe in every field, there are people who have to make the sacrifice to pursue their love for the greater good, and to serve, the community of friends. I have also downsized my car in mid-2017 so as to commit these monies to fund these projects. I totally, rigorously, and kindly reject all forms of donations, be they from friends, from retailers, from manufacturers. This is a hobby, and my teachers and advisors in life have advised me that to bring balance to life, and to be wholesome, one will engage in a livelihood (daily job or business) that earns the monies, and one will also simultaneously engage in a hobby/service in life that is non-competitive, non-monetarily-remunerative. My wife totally understands and so kindly supports my decision and efforts. Friends also of course, know that my videos cannot be monetized due to the inclusion of music clips. Vinyl music is a lovely hobby I hold dearly. Friends and buddies are my ultimate responsibility and my love. I want the very best for them, and to provide totally honest reviews. Moles exist in hifi forums, moles also exist from benefactors who donate. I do not want to remotely encounter any moles masquerading as benefactors donating to my cause, only to find out sooner or later that such donations were/are from certain manufacturers or retailers. Everybody will do things differently. I want to maintain my status as a common-folk, aspire always to adopt the Shokunin spirit: of spending the utmost diligent care, through unhurried work, never caring for returns, in perfecting their work for the community. The personal satisfaction of getting to the very best equipment in each price class to help all my lovely buddies and friends is, the only thing, in store for me :-D We toast to the joy and bliss of vinyl analogue music. Vinyl Music deserves our love and attention. Our listening. Our care. “Everybody will be dancing and doing it right - by Daft Punk” Let's go, buddies and friends!!! Warmest Regards, ~ ian :-D ****** Music Attribution: Music kindly used with permission from www.bensound.com www.purple-planet.com Thank you very much :-D