Between finishing my thesis and moving cross country for a new job, I haven’t had much time in the past six months for projects. Things are finally calming down though and I got back into the groove with a simple repair. My Sony PS-X7 turntable is from the 70s and the wear and tear is starting to show. The left channel was always intermittent and during the move it finally broke completely. So I disassembled the turntable, came up with a simple plan and spent a few hours one night fixing it.

To start, the turntable had both its audio and grounding cables hardwired. I never like seeing that as it means if the cable goes, it takes a bit of work to repair. And the cable usually goes, especially after 40+ years of use. When I opened up the bottom of the turntable, I found what may have been my root cause. Both audio channels were essentially crimped under a metal plate as a stress “relief.” Doing a little continuity checking with a multimeter, the cable could conduct properly when the relief was undone and when the relief was bolted down again, the channel broke. To me, this meant that the cable was internally broken and needed fixing.

My line of reasoning on this was that if a crimped down cable can lose signal after a period of use, it will happen again if I just put things back the way they were. Instead, I decided to remove the cable completely and put a pair of RCA jacks on the rear of the turntable. To complete the modification, I did the same with the grounding wire by removing it and putting a binding post with the RCA jacks.

The actual fix could not have been easier. I started with marking out where I wanted the three jacks to go and making some measurements to ensure everything would fit. After drilling the holes and screwing down the jacks, the next step was to remove the old cables. I used some solder wick for this and the cables came out very easily with zero damage to the circuit board they were attached to. The final step was to add some wires from the old contact pads to the new jacks and put everything back together. The one picture I took of this whole process is of the wires after I soldered them to the old contacts and before I cleaned it up.

I have to say, I am very pleased with how this all came out. The jacks look good where they are on the turntable, it was a cheap and easy fix, and, most importantly, it sounds good. In fact, I think I inadvertently also fixed a grounding issue the table had and now it is dead silent with zero hum. Would I recommend everyone go out and replace the cables on their turntable with jacks? No. But if you are having issues, I certainly think this was a good repair option.