![ariston turntable ariston turntable](https://live.staticflickr.com/1324/1379139997_5825d13e63_c.jpg)
Wow! Never before and never since have I ever even heard of a company of such honor and integrity, and I doubt if I ever will again.
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Grateful for his generosity, I asked for instructions for returning the original turntable to the factory, and was frankly amazed when he told me that there was no need to do so that I could either keep it or destroy it and throw it away as I saw fit but that he would appreciate it if I would never sell it: Ariston had a reputation for quality to maintain, he said, and he would not like to have any product not fully up to their standards ever be in circulation.
![ariston turntable ariston turntable](https://www.for-sale.co.uk/sh-img/IMG_4670-e1516112529420_ariston%2Bturntable.jpg)
He would, of course, pay for all regular shipping charges, he said, or if I wanted air freight, he would appreciate it if I would pay just that extra cost, which I agreed to do. Responding that that would be unnecessary, he then asked me for my address.Īfter I gave it to him, he apologized profusely, saying that he was deeply sorry that a product of less than their usual quality had been sold to me and that, in compensation, he was going to send me at no cost a brand new RD11 Superieur. Then he asked me for the exact date of purchase, the price paid, and the name of the store I had bought it from, all of which I answered, offering, in addition, to FAX him, after we got off our call, my original receipt and sale documents. When I explained my problem to him, he asked if I had bought the turntable new (yes) and, explaining to me that their current model was the RD11 Superieur, which had been in production for nearly two years, he asked if I had known that I was buying a discontinued model (no). They responded promptly, and when the appointed time came, I called and to my great surprise, was transferred immediately to their Managing Director – the head of the company – a very charming gentleman whose name may have been (remember that this was nearly thirty years ago) Graham something.
![ariston turntable ariston turntable](https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20200215/4772aaa5318c1a96db70da67aed6b963.jpg)
Hunting them down was no mean feat (remember that this was before the internet), but when I was able to, I sent them a telegram (remember those?) saying that I had a problem and requesting the name of someone to talk to and the best time and number to call. When I called them, though, they told me that their Ariston distributorship was for Canada, only, and that, with no current US distributor, about the only thing I could do to try to get help was to contact Ariston in Scotland, directly. Initially, I didn’t even want to get it serviced, but just wanted to know what I could do, myself, to get it back to looking good and, in an effort to find out, I tried to hunt down Ariston’s US distributor, only to discover that it no longer carried the Ariston line, and that the closest source of aid would be the Canadian distributor, who also distributed Ortofon. I didn’t like that at all, and wanted to know what I could do to fix it. What happened with my RD11s was this: Not long after I bought it, the dealer I had bought it from went out of business and, not long after that, I noticed that the sides of its platter had, since I had owned it, gone from bright, shiny, polished aluminum, to a dull, flat, almost “zinc-looking” grey. I’ll probably never know which was actually the case and, frankly, I don’t really care: Both the Linn and the Ariston ‘tables are very fine (I still own examples of both) and it’s not the quality of the turntables that this article is about, but rather the quality of the people and the organizations associated with them and, over a fairly long period of time, other audio products that I’ve either owned or considered buying. That all made sense because, also depending on who you spoke to or where you read it, Ivor Tiefenbrun, Linn’s founder, either had worked for Ariston, borrowed ideas from Ariston, or both he and Ariston bought their turntables from the same outside contract manufacturer. The Ariston was a Scottish turntable that antedated the Linn Sondek LP-12, and was either identical to it, better than it, worse than it, similar but different, or actually the same product, re-branded, depending on who you spoke to. Twitter Facebook Email Print LinkedIn Pinterest SMS WhatsAppīack some time in the mid-1980s, I bought an Ariston RD11s turntable from a local High End audio dealer in Brea, California.