I found myself, back in 1993, touring the high-end shops of Helsinki with the little modded machine under my arm, and demonstrating my results. In one case, at the location of a well-known Scandinavian high-end chain, a salesman hooked up the little machine to an extremely high-end system – full-range speakers, high-end amplification – and a boardroom door upstairs opened up and a host of executives poured out to hear what they thought was the latest high-end CD player, and when the salesman pointed to the little SP-25, they simply stared and without a word shuffled back into the board room and shut the door. The salesman himself asked me to modify his Reference Thorens for idler-wheel drive operation.
Not burdened with a completely rebuilt high-quality machine but instead a low-quality mass-market machine, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the only explanation for what I – and others – was hearing was the drive system, since there could be no other explanation.