RetroTech: Play vinyl records with CD functionality - Sharp RP-117

a couple of years ago I protect a video where I repaired and then demonstrated a vertical turntable from sharp well this video today is going to be a bit of a sequel to that one in this video I'm going to be showing you a different model from their range they had quite a few unusual turntables in the eighties the one I'm going to show you today is perhaps the most advanced one they brought out it's from the 1983 / 84 catalog and it was a time when they just introduced their first CD player and the turntable I'm going to show you is the sharp rp1 one seven which brings a lot of the features of a CD player into the world of vinyl records now the turntable I bought is in need of repair and I hope I'm able to affect those repairs so that I can demonstrate it to you properly it's a draw a loading turntable it's able to play both sides of a record without you having to take it out and flip it over one stylus goes in that door there and then the other one is behind this door on the other side I'll flip it around so you can see the back is just a standard RCA output here which needs to go into a phono preamp and we've got a u.s. style plug on here because I imported this one from the US and therefore it runs on a hundred and twenty volts he says 60 Hertz there I'm hoping it's also able to run on 50 Hertz without affecting the play speed of the record but we'll find out later on plugging it into a UK to us power converter I can see that it is operating the lights are coming on it's quite hard to see on the camera here and when I press the buttons it is making a noise but the turntable doesn't spin it definitely needs a new belt amongst other things so we'll open it up and take you apart so this video is going to be in two parts really the first part is me trying to repair the turntable and then the second part I'll demonstrate hopefully how it works if I remember I'll put a time code in the video description and that will enable you to jump past the repair section to the second half if you're not particularly interested in this if you're still here there I'll give you a bit of a tour we've got the stylus on the top there and then another one on the bottom which will play the B side of the record the IDE put it in in the draw here when you push it it clamps it down in the center and you can play both sides the stylist is moving in here I've press the play button so you see this part of the mechanism is working there's definitely some power getting through to it but the actual turntable itself doesn't spin but of course the reason for that will be the rubber drive belt has perished and stopped and just needs replacing the same thing happens with any machinery of this age whether it's a record player or a cassette deck so it's just a matter of getting the right drive belt kit which I got off eBay we got the main one for the turntable and a smaller one for the drawer loading mechanism the only issue I had was trying to figure out where that main bell went I couldn't spot where it was supposed to go around ended up downloading the repair manual off the internet which tells me that I need to access it from the base by flipping the machine over and removing a couple of metal plates so just a quick tip while I'm doing this if you do see something advertised for sale second hand that's quite a few years old and the person says well it does switch on the lights all come on you can hear the motor but nothing's spinning around there more than likely it's going to be that the belt has perished and of course that's the scenario we've got here you can see the belt hanging out of the machine I'll just pick this up after a certain amount of time these belts just disintegrate you can see here I can just pull this apart with no effort at all so that's obviously these replacing now I need to get access to the other side of this to be able to get into this properly and also you sometimes have to clear off any kind of residue that's come off rubber like that if it's got to a certain age it just really chose to kind of gunk and gets wrapped around a lot of things you want to clean all that off first you can see got a bit on the motor here so I'm just going to use some IPA solvent so make sure I wipe off any carrier black gooey residue that's in here otherwise it would stick to the new belt that I'm putting in now the belt has to go around the motor there and then around the big wheel here because the only problem is it is a big piece of metal in the way there's no way I can access it from the bottom so we've got to take care of this panel on the top it's about to feed the belt through from the top and then get it down to the bottom flip it back over again so it can put it around that motor now I have to say this is more complicated than you get in most turntables some cassette decks can get pretty tricky with the drive belts but this is a particularly complicated turntable but we've got the belt in and it's all going around nicely so it can put the panels on and then we could flip the thing back over again and then try resolve the next prop we've got which is with the drawer loading mechanism now the idea is you press new jet button and the drawer will open and then press it again and it will close on this one you press it all that happens is this motor runs but no kind of movement of the dry can see I can freely move the drawer forward and back it should actually be engaging on those teeth on that track so if we remove the motor here we'll see what's gone wrong underneath and as we flip it over we can see there's a little bit of metal there that supposed to have a car grounded and the cogs missing the COG is actually down inside there and the reason it's fallen off is because it's got a crack in it now the same thing happens with the warm and DD range they have a sensor cog in there that's around a piece of metal seems to be a bad design idea so I mixed up some epoxy resin glued the COG and then left it to dry overnight so now while that was going on I thought I'll see if I can figure out where that other belt goes for the drawer loading mechanism and replace that well I found out where it is it's dead center of your image gunner in that wheel almost impossible to get to and the one that's on there seems to be working fine so it didn't bother replacing it okay so next morning got my glued cog try and push it back onto the metal sensor and immediately it snaps perhaps I was expecting too much too but anyway I got some more epoxy resin mixed up glued it this time I thought I'd glue it to the metal wheels so therefore it's definitely not gonna come off there next day looks okay screwed it all back in place press the eject mechanism you can see it is working but it's got a jerkiness you can see it stop every now and then that's because the COG where I glued it is slightly wider than the other ones on the wheel and therefore it's causing a bit of an issue I thought well I could probably live with it but then I couldn't because it snapped again as you can see here the drawer could have been moved so what do I do well fortunately there's a chap on eBay that sells this exact part it's such a common problem he sold a hundred and fifty-five of them at the time I bought mine just think how many turntables people have thrown away because that particular cog is broken yet for so it's head pounds or so you can repair it just putting that little cog in there and yes you could 3d print these yourself but I don't have a 3d printer it's much cheaper to buy it from him anyway put the COG back on my motor luckily didn't snap so can reassemble it all now we can try that eject mechanism so just press the button here drawer opens lovely and smooth exactly how it should work so finally it's time to put a record into this and I'm going to demonstrate hopefully that main feature that I find impressive on this turntable a fact that you can jump to any track you want on a record by selecting it on the frontier so I've picked track number four I can see a light has lit up on the front there and when I press play we can see the hour moves from the outside towards the inside of the disc completely ignores the track I wanted it to plane instead puts down this stylus in the run out now I was a little bit concerned here I thought I might've fallen at the last hurdle if this problem is something to do with the electronics of the turntable well that's beyond my repair abilities luckily it turns out it's just something simple and physical inside the end of the arm here where this stylus cartridge is if you look at the bottom of the image just in front of the stylus I'll break out the macro lens you can see a couple of little holes here about the size of the tip of a biro pen inside one of them is a light emitter and the other one is a receiver that's how it identifies the gap between tracks he gets a reflection back into the receiver when the disc gets to the shiny part between tracks well just full of dust so I blew it out with some compressed air and let's try it again so we're gonna pick track two and track six here so I press play again we can see they are moving across the disc now on this first sweep notice the record isn't spinning our thing this initial identification process is to see how big the record is is it a seven inch a 10 inch or a 12 inch so just to figure out where the ends of it are and then once it knows that it can put the stylus down in a track you've chosen so track two there we go so that's working fine so now we can press track skip and see where it goes so because past track three and four and five and puts the stylus down on six now of course I also cleaned out the cartridge for side B of the records let's check that one's working fine so select a track on side B the stylus lifts off the record on side a the record stops spinning and then spins in the opposite direction and then this stylus for side B moves across of interposition and drops down or up I should say exactly as it should so we could put the whole thing back together I can demonstrate it to you properly now the sharp RP what once have really does bring quite a lot of the convenience of a CD player to a vinyl record player not least of which is the fact that you can stack it neatly in a system and it really doesn't take up much room at all it's certainly a lot more compact than my main turntable which is a sunsoo 8 XR q7 I've got no intention of replacing that with the sharp the shops just here for demonstration purposes but I'm going to plug it into the photo printer at normal use or by main turntable and of course that in turn is plugged into the rest of the hi-fi system so we can give the show-up a good try of course I should mention there were other manufacturers that have draw loading turntables in their product ranges it wasn't that unusual people like Sony and pioneer and of course budget people like Amstrad here in the UK and then of course there were other manufacturers that had turntables that could enable you to skip around and select individual tracks people like technics and a queue track and pioneer but I can only demonstrate one machine to you so I'll show you this one you have complete control over the playback of the disc side a is indicated by green side B is orange if you're T to play both side a and then side B one after the other just press the appropriate both sides button if you wanted to repeat the disc over and over again press repeat and if you wanted to repeat just say side B well select side B and then press the repeat button the buttons across the bottom are equally self-explanatory forward and reverse will of course take your track bar track through the disc or through the program that you've set for that disc you will lift a stylus off the disc and play and cut a basically start and stop speed 33 or 45 selected at the bottom there now you can play record in a traditional way from the beginning to the end or if you prefer just pick the tracks you like so I'm gonna do one three five and seven on side a and then two four and six on side B notice the little LEDs on the display indicate your selection it works its way through the program in the exact order in which you press the buttons so if I press track seven on side B followed by track two on side a then back to side B for track three it would do that now of course I'm not going to be able to accurately demonstrate the sound quality of this turntable to you over YouTube for rather obvious reasons in case you don't know what those obvious reasons are all named here the first one is I don't have any copyright free vinyl does such a thing even exist and secondly of course I've got an analogue source here and you're listening to a digital stream I best describe it them sounds fine to me no issues at all I can't complain it perhaps doesn't sound as good as my other turntable a little bit harsher but you know why if you never heard a better turntable you would have no complaints about the sound quality of this one now I want to show you here that it remembers the tracks that it's previously played so at the won't we're on track to on side B for press reverse it will go back to the previous track use play which was track 7 on side a so you can see there little light flashes to show the track that's being played and then the stylus is moving in okay now clearly it's not as quick to jump around a big vinyl LP as it would be on a CD let's demonstrate how long it takes to get to a track a pic track to juice know the ledge from the juice soundtrack one of my favorites are it being raccoon press track 2 press Start and it moves the stylus in and it just catches a little bit of the fade out of the previous track because of course the tolerance between one track and the next on a vinyl LP is very fine so you just tend to hear a little bit of the previous one and then you get your tram and you've selected what request I received quite frequently is from people asking me if I'm ever going to review the e LP laser turntable it's a record player that reads vinyl with lasers rather than with a stylus well the answer is no there's a couple of reasons one it can't read picture discs or colored vinyl or clear vinyl and I believe it even has issues with any kind of dust it's all on black vinyl and secondly it costs eight thousand dollars for the cheapest one this thing is a heck of a lot cheaper and can play color clear and picture this vinyl the only issue it's going to have with them though you can't use the track selection function because it's unable to see the gap between tracks on those kind of discs but it doesn't stop you from playing the record normally from beginning to end and of course on this one you can play side a followed by side B without even getting up from your chair so there you go that's a sharp RP one one seven a record play that came from an era when records or vinyl as people would like to call them nowadays weren't something that was hip or trendy or fashionable or even retro it was just the way you bought music and if you had a large music collection more than likely it would be on a lot of records why not make a machine that's capable of playing those records in a more convenient way able to skip to the particular track you want or avoid a track or an album that you don't like play side a then ciebie automatically you can hide this thing away in a stack you don't have to take up any counter space I think it's a good idea and have this idea in 1983 so given all the recent vinyl revival what's the modern-day equivalent of this turntable well there just isn't one you've got two different directions to go if you want to buy a record player nowadays you can either go cheaper nasty and plasticky novelty or you can go in the other direction and get a a decent quality turntable but one that's pretty much as dull as dishwater when it comes to features you've got a belt drive and a manual tone arm this kind of mid-range it's packed full of Technology just doesn't exist now and it's a bit of a shame and people say well hold on a minute nobody wants things like that nowadays well certainly some people out there do because 155 people bought their flippin plastic cogs repair this one and this was never a great sounding turntable in the first place but anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,074,038

Rating: 4.9315166 out of 5

Keywords: Techmoan, sharp, rp-117, vinyl, album, record, player, both sides, programmable, drawer load, repair, demo, retro, retrotech

Id: GgAUxJmh5uE

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/failtuna]

Techomoan is right. We need a revival of this type of player. Not quite audiophile level but not cheap and plasticy, I love old tech.

[u/JustAHerpDerp]

I found one of these at Goodwill for $15. Had to replace all the belts and the gear that ejects the tray. It was really cool because it played both sides without having to flip it over, and detected where the different tracks were so you could skip around or shuffle them. There were two linear tracking arms, one on top and one on the bottom, and IR sensors on either side of the stylus to detect tracks. The stylus and cartridges were custom to this product line, as far as I could tell.

The sound wasn't the greatest, but it was neat to get up and running again. I ended up selling it when I got another turntable, which is how my stereo system evolves over time.

Edit: I should have watched the video before making the comment, he goes over most of the same information. Wish he put it out before I repaired mine, I had to guess on taking most of it apart.

[u/placidcasual98]

Love me some techmoan!

[u/soufend]

I haven't seen too many Techmoan videos but was surprised when he said that the Juice Soundtrack was one of his favorite albums. Was not expecting that.

[u/Darthvegas666]

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

[u/thewaxbandit]

Reminds me of the first time I saw a laserdisc player.

[u/unsurebutwilling]

the most amazing thing is the dude who noticed that ridiculous niche market of broken gear wheels and made over 1500 quid off it...

[u/Pete_Iredale]

That's one super interesting turntable, and a great video to boot! Thanks!

[u/mrrockandroll]

The technology is cool, and I'm sure it'll make for a great conversation piece at the next "get together," but if the Sharp folks think I'm feeding any one of the 1500+ pieces of vinyl from my collection into that contraption they should probably think again.