Audio road trips & the Metzner Starlight

By mrgoodsound

Since I began collecting vintage audio equipment 3 years ago, my favourite weekend pastime has been driving to far-off places to pick up rare gear. It's an opportunity I take up at least twice a month to clear my head from a heavy week of my day job by cruising the Ontario countryside, meeting new people, and coming home with a new audio toy (or several). This weekend was one of the most interesting excursions yet, taking me to Acton, a small town with a population of under 10,000. 

First, a little backstory. I have been collecting vintage turntables in some sort of misguided quest to find 'the one'. Two years ago I made an offer on a Metzner Starlight that popped on eBay. It was grossly overpriced so I did not think my lowball offer (which was still overpaying) would be accepted, but of course it did. I was naive about these sort of things back then and expected things to kind of just work. When it arrived it had a number of issues that I realized would not be easily solved and I put it aside in frustration for a long time. I recently pulled it out of storage to disassemble and clean it, determined to get it working, but disaster struck: I foolishly polished the printing straight off the fascia of the unit.

I was disheartened a second time by this Metzner, and put it aside again. Sure enough another one popped up on eBay, this time the seller was local. I immediately considered bidding, stopped myself, paced back and forth, then decided to only bid at the last second. Of course I won. The seller reached out to me offering local pickup, and that is how I met Pat from Acton, Ontario. More on the Metzner later.

Pat lives on a beautiful 120 acre plot of farmland. The quality of the air in the countryside is different. It allows for calmness and clarity of thought, the benefits of which I immediately lose when driving back to the city. Probably why I make so many stupid audio purchases. I met Pat in his yard and he welcomed me into his garage to look at the turntable. I immediately recognized that I was dealing with another serious enthusiast. His garage had it all: Altec, Ampex, Electrovoice, McCurdy, McIntosh, Northern Electric, Presto, and so on. Classic American and Canadian audio equipment everywhere you looked, much of it professional or studio equipment. Cutting amplifiers, tape machines, an Altec 604 RWB in its original cabinet, multi-cell horns, oh my. 

There was a lot of equipment I had only read about or seen photos of, and now here it was in the flesh. I asked Pat for a tour to which he obliged. He would point at things and start talking about them only for me to interrupt and name it. 'Yeah, I know, that's a Presto cutting amp.' This was ignored the first few times until he finally turned to me and exclaimed; 'How do you know what that is?'. I could only grin in reply.

Eventually I came out of my daze and entered scavenger mode, asking if he was selling anything else. 'Sure, what are you looking for?'. I mentioned I was looking for a small amplifier, and he pointed to a diminutive tube amplifier sitting on the shelf. At first glance it looked like any Magnavox, RCA or Zenith console amplifier I had seen before. A 12AX7 drove a pair of EL84s for single-ended output. Upon closer inspection, a cool English-made Plessey electrolytic capacitor was spotted, and the output transformers were distinctly un-American. My best guess is the amplifier came from a Canadian console. 

I asked Pat to hook it up to make sure it was all working, and then noticed a distinct lack of any turntable set up anywhere. 'Oh yeah, I mostly listen to tapes in here'. No kidding, the walls were lined with tapes, pre-recorded and home-made. A Sony reel-to-reel in the corner was connected to the mystery console amp with some cursing. Pat pulled out a tape for our impromptu listening session. 'Do you like Joan Baez?'. Are you kidding? Do you even have to ask?

In a few moments, Baez was singing Dylan out of two enormous wall-mounted Electrovoice speakers. Her voice was clear, warm and larger than life. I guess if you ever want to audition equipment for someone to purchase, cheat and use a tape source. 'I'll take it'. We spent a while longer talking tonearms and speakers before I thanked Pat for his time and took the Metzner and amplifier home.

The mystery console amplifier does indeed sound quite good. I can't say I've ever heard an EL84 amp I didn't like. Single-ended ones with vintage iron are especially sweet. Like almost all console amps, this one needs a pre-amp. Its voice is a little too naked and the playback speed a little too quick without one.

Back to the 'star' of our show, the Starlight turntable. It's a rather unique machine, manufactured in the early 1950s in Japan for Robert Metzner of California. Metzner is probably more well known for his other venture of importing Akai reel-to-reel machines to the US and his company Califone who sold tape machines and record players to the educational market. The Starlight uses a direct drive system, in which a motor-driven worm gear interfaces with a series of two discs. The second disc is mounted on the platter shaft and its position may be altered for variable speed control a la Lenco. It's an incredibly simple and effective drive train, similar to the earliest electric gramophones, and unfortunately largely vanished from the marketplace after the 50s. There are a few different revisions of the Starlight with a different top plate and controls, but the basic motor system is the same.

The Starlight has two major problems which make restoration a pain. First, the worm gear has a rubber coating which wears over time and becomes noisy. Voice of Music in the US sells refurbished worm gears. Second, the platter sleeve was made from quite cheap stamped aluminum and is prone to wear, resulting in platter wobble. There is no easy solution here, if the platter sleeve is worn you must have a machinist make you a new one, preferably from bronze or brass. This was the case for my first Starlight, thankfully this new one is much better in that regard and I think the original sleeve can be left.

Other annoying tidbits include a glued-on cork mat which must be scraped off, an integral 45 RPM adapter which must be popped off, and rubber motor grommets which have hardened and must be replaced. I may write a follow-up article on the results when the restoration is done. I am determined to get this player working. Thank you to Pat! See some more of his collection below.