Was given a Hitachi HT-2 Turntable the other day!

[vortalexfan]

Hello everyone, the other day I was at my parents house picking up a return label that I had printed off on their printer because my printer was out of ink, and I had left it there the night before, and I decided to pay a friend of mine a visit who also is the A/V guy at the High School I graduated from.

He used to be able to give me some of the school's older retired equipment, and that how I got to know him, but the school got a new Technology director that wouldn't allow him to give away the older equipment anymore, so unfortunately that connection for vintage A/V equipment is shot now.

Anyways there was a bright side to that visit though and that was that he gave me a Hitachi HT-2 Turntable that a friend of his gave him because the needle was missing on it and his friend thought he could maybe get it going.

The turntable uses a P-Mount Cartridge and the cartridge that was on this turntable originally was an Audio Technica DR200E Cartridge which uses the Audio Technica AT3472 Needle which is the same needle that the AT90 Cartridge uses which I was told was a $30 needle and was confirmed by looking it up on Gary Stork's Website.

Anyways I actually had a Dual 1218 Turntable with a Audio Technica AT90 Cartridge on it and a perfectly good needle on it so I took the needle off of my AT90 Cartridge and installed it on my Hitachi Turntable and sure enough it worked, but it had a lot of background rumble and noise.

So I took a look at the AT90 Cartridge I had and sure enough it was a dual mount cartridge where it could either mount as a 1/2" mount or a P-Mount cartridge so I took the AT90 cartridge and mounted it onto the Hitachi turntable and installed the needle for it and tried it with a record and sure enough the background rumble and noise disappeared.

So that's the story of my latest find.

I would love to hear what some of you guys think of this particular Turntable, like whether or not this was a good unit and just some general information about this unit as I have not been able to find a whole lot of information about this particular unit online and Vinyl Engine doesn't even have the manuals for this unit in their archives anywhere, which I thought was weird.


Thanks.