The Antique Collector Installment 4 - More on H.H. Scott

Posted by: Steven Stone at 1:01 pm, June 21st, 2009

        
 
Taking off the bottom cover on a kit-built component is a moment akin to pulling that RCA or MERC out of its jacket in a musty old record store.   Will it be GOOD?  Was the previous owner a Neanderthal or a rocket scientist?  Kit-built components up the ante and crank up the degree of difficulty in evaluating equipment.  Following the trinity of commandments of collecting: CONDITION, CONDITION, and of course CONDITION, becomes even more challenging.  Some people feel this level of difficulty is what makes owning old components so much fun.  With kits, it’s always possible that you will luck upon the works of an electronic Michelangelo.  Kits are Pandora’s boxes, capable of revealing pearls or just plain letting the smoke out. "Letting the smoke out" is such a wonderful term, coined by some witty engineer to describe the phenomena of an amplifier going up in smoke.  The base concept here is that all electronic devices are magic boxes run on supernatural smoke.  When electronic devices break, all that really happens is the cabinet springs a leak and lets the magic smoke out.  Sounds pretty good to me. 

 
THE SCOTT 710 TURNTABLE
 
This engineering "marvel" was manufactured from 1954 to September 1960.  The 710s' features included an expanded scale optical stroboscope, precision helical drive gears, high compliance torsional filtering, dual-stage mechanical filtering, an integral pickup-arm mounting board, a vernier speed drive, and a heavy duty induction motor to power this copywriters' wet dream.
 
The 710 had three speeds, 33 1/3, 45, and 78, and could accommodate any arm currently available, although the wooden Grado Laboratory Model, or Scotts' own stereo tonearm-cartridge combination - the model 1000, seemed to be the arms of choice on the Scotts I've seen.  At a time when isolated suspension and a floating subchassis were almost nonexistent in turntables, the Scott had both.  The Scott not only isolated the motor from the platter and subchassis, but also hung the motor on rubber "screws" that isolated it from the top-plate as well.  The arm board was firmly attached to the heavy cast aluminum subchassis that according to Scotts' ad copy "eliminates acoustic feedback and other undesirable vibration differences between pick-up arm and turntable".

        
 
The helical gear drive, made of hardened steel and nylon, housed in an oil-filled "transmission", was developed for Scott by Prof. Earle Buckingham of MIT.  Prof. Buckingham also designed the drive mechanism for the Mt. Palomar 200 inch telescope, a device known for low flutter and maximum WOW.  The drive system on the Scott is unique.  It begins with the special heavy-duty induction motor with a dynamically balanced rotor specifically designed for the Scott.  The motors' drive shaft is a conical shaped part made of a special linen-phenol material that looks very much like wood.
This cone has three neoprene idlers (one for each speed) that could be adjusted up and down the cone to allow for up to 5% speed variation.  The idlers contacted a large and rather weighty steel cylinder that whose shaft utilized two rubber u-joints to
mechanically isolate it from the shaft that finally connected to the helical worm-drive.
 
Whether this unique solution to the problems of turntable isolation and noise rivals current turntable design technology sonically is impossible to say.  Both samples of the Scott 710 I've examined suffer from the same problems - the rubber u-joints "rotted" and the linen-phenol drive cones developed ruts from the neoprene idler wheels.  Somehow gaffer tape just doesn't serve as an adequate substitution for the missing joints, and there's nothing to be done for the worn drive cone.  With the gaffer tape parts kluge the turntable will work, but it will not work well, and certainly cannot be evaluated in this condition.
     
When first introduced the Scott 710 cost $107.  By the time the 710 was discontinued, the price had risen to $133.55.  It was an expensive turntable, but no more expensive than the Rek-o-kut model B-12H or the Rondine Deluxe.  While this piece is rare, so are most turntables from this era.  While I doubt even a mint 710 will be the sonic equal of a Goldmund table, the Scott has the potential to be a nice sounding unit.  If you chance across a 710 with all its parts intact, try it, you may like it.