TECHNICS EXPLAINS WHY THEIR SL-1200G TURNTABLE COSTS SO MUCH

Everyone is excited by Technics’ return to making high-end, club-standard, turntables again — but vinyl-junkies are less excited by the huge price tag. 

At the moment, the new SL-1200G turntable costs twice as much as the previous 1210s, but Technics’ CTO, Tetsuya Itani, explained to What Hi-Fi recently why the new turntables are so expensive.

"Because the original 1210 turntables were manufactured for so many years, the manufacturing process had got to a very low cost. Now we need to invest in all the tools again, and the price now is much higher than the 1970s,” he said.

According to Itani all of the old tools and machines are no longer available or damaged beyond use, meaning they have to start over again from scratch, which mean costs — at least at the beginning of the process — will be substantially bigger but will come down in time. 

"We began to study just a few months prior to IFA, maybe summer 2014, for the new SL-1200. We learned that it was impossible [to make the same deck], as almost all the tools for manufacturing were gone or heavily damaged - only one "die" remained, and that was for the dust cover.”

Itani has said once they launch the new deck – which is still on course for this June – they will begin to look at bringing down the cost, “Right now, we start thinking [about a more affordable model]. But not definitely right now.”

[Via What Hi-Fi?]