Vintage Sota Sapphire Transcriptor Turntable Rare

Description

Vintage Sota Sapphire Transcriptor Turntable Rare.
This Turntable was recently acquired from a collector. Due to its age this unit is sold as is!
Essentially, every other SOTA table has it’s roots in the Sapphire design. The Sapphire was actually an attempt to improve upon the fiddly nature of the Linn Sondek LP12, which was considered the finest turntable in the world at the time. The problem was, it was fussy and fiddly and required setup by someone trained in the Linn “dark arts” with all of the proper gizmos and tools to get it optimized. Plus, it had to be tweaked regularly for best performance. The Sapphire was engineered differently. The folks at SOTA wanted their table to sound as good or better than the LP12, but be easy to set up and once it was set up, to stay that way.
When it comes to engineering a turntable chassis there are basically two types of design; sprung suspension designs or rigid designs. Both have their pluses and challenges, and their adherents and detractors. The Sapphire is a sprung suspension design but it is totally unique in that instead of resting “on” a set of springs, it was the first ever design that was mass loaded and “hung” from a set of springs. In the end, that enabled the Sapphire to give incredible performance at keeping acoustic interference away from the table and at the same time creating a platform for the LP and the cartridge/arm/table interface that has stability beyond reproach. A proof point of that stability is that when it’s properly set up and playing an album, you can bang on the top plate with your fist and not disturb the record from playing! When it was launched, the original Sapphire was considered the new reference standard by many audiophiles worldwide and it  continues to be in production today after 40 years in its latest MkVI garb… a good run I’d say!