The GF-680 has decent sound, and she can play her tapes and CD's in it while she works in her home office. It has the nice wooden plinth with the lift-up wood and plexiglas cover, and it blows away the hideous, Chinese-made, plastic platter, belt-drive "turntable" that came in her TEAC GF-680 entertainment center. I bought the SL 95B for my wife to play her old albums on. Two of those turntables - a BSR 810 and a Garrard SL 95B - are "record changers." Both claim to be "transcription" turntables, but that's stretching the truth. I like to collect old electronics equipment. I also had 4 oscilloscopes until I recently sold one of them. I have 6 turntables, a fact that has prompted my teenage son to think I'm certifiable. I hate to see emaidel crucified alone, so I decided to join him. This is a reply to an old post regarding cartridges for the Garrard SL 95B record changer. The original Garrard Lab 80 of 1964 remains a beautiful machine to this day. But I have always felt that its chaste, tasteful styling was a standout among its competitors. The Lab 80, however, doesn't play at the 78 speed and it doesn't use the pusher platform to change records. If I do decide to play LPs singly, it's up to the task too it's easy to swap styli in the Stanton 500 cartridge and the 500E Mk II tracks well in the A70's arm, to below two grams. The A70 handles the chore for me, safely and efficiently. My 78s are not rare or valuable, and I'm admittedly too lazy to get up and change records every three minutes when listening to an extended-length classical work. I still use my Garrard A70 in my second system with an upgraded vintage Fisher 800B receiver, as an automatic record changer to play 78rpm records. They have the best, most reliable and safest automatic record changing mechanism ever: Garrard's pusher platform. The Type A, and even more the Type A70 due to a better tonearm, do have advantages. To stop play safely, the ONLY way on these machines is to use the automatic reject function. The setdown mechanism wouldn't let you move the arm back from its automatic setdown position without overriding a safety spring that was there to prevent damage to the machinery, and if at that point you lost your firm grip on the arm, it would go skittering, bouncing across the record, the stylus probably gouging the record. All of these models shared an operational inconvenience (not a "defect" or "fault" since they are working as designed) in that if you started to play a record in AUTO and then wanted to pick up the arm and put it back onto its rest, you couldn't. The RC88 begat the Garrard Type A of 1961, which was proclaimed as being "the step beyond the turntable - the step beyond the changer - the world's first Automatic Turntable!" The Type A's successors were the Type A70 and the Lab 80 of 1964. The Lab 80 also suffered from its being a derivative of the RC88 record changer of 1958. Subsequent PE machines were rebranded Duals. Perpetuum-Ebner gave up after that and sold itself to Dual, which scrapped the PE2020 design. I often thought the PE 2020 was specifically designed in order to circumvent patents held by Garrard, Dual and Miracord, resulting in a Rube Goldberg-like mess of second-best and third-best design elements.and worse.
It was even worse! Furthermore in normal consumer use it seemed to teeter on the ragged edge of malfunction most of the time. There was an automatic record changer of the time which was more arcane and complex in its design: the Perpetuum-Ebner 2020. Replacing those parts was a somewhat tedious job. Garrard did issue an upgraded part made of metal instead of plastic but it didn't show up until the followup model, the Lab 80 Mk II, along with an "escape" path in the cam. Turn the platter backwards into its automatic cycle and a plastic tip on the spindle-operating cam follower would become trapped in a dead-end in its cam, and would break off. The Lab 80 had a glaring design error which would disable it if an owner were unlucky enough to encounter it (and it wasn't all that hard to do). That you have one that's 45 years old and still works is nice, but few that we sold lasted more than a week before problems set in. Almost all of us in the store switched customers over to the Dual equivalent, as it was not only a better turntable to begin with, but a less troublesome one too. While I certainly can't dispute your experience, my statement was based on the enormous amount of returns on the LAB-80 we received at Lafayette Radio when we were selling the unit back then.
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