Luxman PD121

Minor bestseller in Japan for the mid-end segment of the record player market.

A mid-end which here allowed a high-end feature : to upgrade the reproduced sound with the help of the ubiquitous SME 3009 tonearm.

A marketing slant rarely used for this not-too-pricey segement but for the later Trio/Kenwood KD-500.
Other tonearms were mountable of course but 3009s were the ones most often used on 121s - and everybody had one anyway, and Luxman advertised the PD121 that way anyway, too.

The base of the PD121, however, is built as a one-piece diecast mold so it'll be difficult to tweak the driving part of it.

The PD121A inherited from the load-free spindle system of the more ambitious PD444 and PD441 and added quartz-locking speed control.
It is also different from the original 121 by a different rotor/sub-platter : made of zinc and Luxman tagged vs. the black anodized aluminium of the original PD121.
I don't know exactly when the 121A came up but it was still advertised as "new" in Luxman's catalogs as late as october 1979... Probably sometime in 1978.


UPDATE
And, yes, this was Micro Seiki engineered - with a twist : the PD121 uses the motor of Technics' 1970 SP-10, and so does the Micro DD-10 which was the base for the PD-121. Read this thread here and see this page there for illustrated details.

In the case of the PD121, Lux looked for the Micro DD-10 and... "customed" it the Luxman way. The PD121A's T-Tag is, btw, MITO, where MI = Micro and TO = Tokyo.

This doesn't mean Luxman merely rebadged something, nor that the LUX engineers had nothing to do with the technical development of its PD turntables. Just that LUX was an amplifier maker and Micro the turntable specialist, so the former had to call on the latter for help, like many others. What I hadn't found out until today (march 2014) is that Micro already had a Technics SP-10 motor/rotor in its DD-10, the latter being an intermediary product from before Micro went for all-out DD development a year later with the DD-100.


The 121 is no sonic masterpiece, no PD444 or PD555 but a good mid-end turntable with glorious looks which welcomes upper-end tonearms and is good enough for plenty of tonearm + cartridge custom matching.
The 121A's load-free spindle system lifts replay quality up by a fair push.


Here is a PD121 with another kind of snaky SME ; a PD121 with the usual non-snake SME ; a 121A here.