“There’s some gear DJs expect to see in every club they walk into. Our new series Industry Standards will look at the history, technology and personalities behind these classics of the craft. Once a month for the next six months, we’ll grab one item out of the booth, scratch through the front panel and see what we find. Along the way, we’ll introduce you to the folks who made them, and pick the brains of those who use them week in and week out. What we’d tackle in our first edition was a no-brainer. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more ubiquitous presence in the DJ world than the Technics SL-1200 MK2, the deck that started it all.
In 1979, the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita introduced an updated version of its Technics SL-1200 turntable. Since no official history was ever written, and Matsushita, better known these days as Panasonic, never made much of a fuss about its designers, we know very little about what went into this redesign. But the updates, however modest, made for critical improvements. The pitch adjustment, formerly controlled by two skinny rotary knobs below the platter, were bundled into a single slider next to the tonearm. A start/stop button now set the platter spinning without turning the unit on or off. There were also more subtle changes, like better dampening and a quartz-lock on the motor control circuit for more consistent speed (a weak point in the original model). The MK2 now came in two colors—matte black in addition to the familiar ashy silver—but otherwise looked even less fancy than the down-to-business original. Tweaks aside, Matsushita wasn’t striving for anything more than the humble, middle-of-the-range hi-fi equipment they’d been marketing for much of the decade.” Read The Rest Of The Article HERE.
