The Nighthawk soars

When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply that I'm a turntable setter upper.

- BY MICHAEL TREI

That seems to me like it should be descriptive enough, but it typically results in follow-up questions that have me explaining a whole audiophile subculture that few nonaudiophiles even realize exists. Occasionally, however, I get a call from a newly minted audiophile, a younger person who is diving headfirst into the hobby for the first time and wants to have their new turntable rig set up properly. This happened recently when a young father, Marius, asked me to set up his new Technics SL-1200G with a Hana MH cartridge—a super nice rig for a first turntable. Marius had clearly been studying and was asking all kinds of informed questions as I assembled his new addition. His wife whisked the kids away to run some errands as I was working so that they wouldn't be a distraction, and after a little more than an hour, I had everything nicely dialed in. As we started to listen, the family returned, and seven-year-old Martin was giddy with excitement at the prospect of getting to play with this new machine. I explained to Marius that the 1200G’s swappable headshells made it easy to have a second, less-costly cartridge mounted and ready to go and encouraged him to let his kids play their own records. I was thinking back to my own experience and how when I was around three, my parents moved the family record player up to a higher shelf to get it out of my reach. I am told my response was to climb up the bookcase so I could continue spinning records.