The German-made Dual 701 was introduced around 1973, and was produced for about four years, thus becoming one of the rarer Dual turntables. The Dual 701 has a direct drive motor with a transistorized speed control that is extremely accurate. The platter weighs over six pounds. With a good tone arm and high-end Shure cartridge, playback is excellent. The Dual 701 is considered by many to be the best of the Dual record players.

A friend of my sister-in-law was cleaning out a storage unit, and was going to toss this Dual 701. My sister-in-law rescued it and brought it to me. It did not work at all, not even the motor. I found a copy of the service manual at Vinyl Engine. A common cause of motor failure in these Dual 701 is a bad capacitor in the transistorized motor speed control unit. I replaced the capacitor, and the turntable motor worked just fine.

However, the record player did not cycle properly, due to the usually accumulation of dried lubricants and dirt in the mechanism. Also, the Dual 701, along with some of the changer models, rely on the infamous "steuerpimple" to function properly. This is a little rubber cap that moves a cam by friction to move the tone arm during the cycle. The steuerpimple wears out over time, and replacements can be found online.

After replacing mine, the machine begain working much better. The only issue is that at the end of the record, the tone arm does not return to rest as it should. This is most likely the result of some dried lubricant that will require some disassembly to reach and remove.

Presently, I am feeding the audio signal from the Shure V15 III carridge into a pre-amp, and from there to my RCA International 9-INY-1, with excellent results.

Sometime in the last half of the 1950 decade, Magnavox switched from installing Webster-Chicago built record changers in their consoles to using Collaro changers built in England. These changers were branded as various models of Magnavox Micromatic changers. Magnavox high fidelity and stereophonic sets made from the late 1950's until the early 1980's are equipped mostly with these 600 and 800 series record changers. The model shown here is a 600 series changer, but the model sticker is missing, so I don't know which. It is a stereo model, so it's post 1958, but the Molex power connector had three flat pins instead of round pins, so it is most like early 1960's. I switched out the Molex connector for the round pin type so that it would work the later model consoles.

The cartridge in this unit was so badly corroded the pins broke off as I removed from the harness. The stylus was completely worn down. I replaced the stylus and cartridge with a Pfanstiel P192D, which is does not perform as well as the original Electro-Voice cartridge. The middle and high tones are nice and clear, but bass is weak. However, there doesn't seem to be any other modern cartridge available that I could find.

The other issue with this changer was a failure of the cycling mechanism to trip at the end of a record. This was solved by a good cleaning of the mechanism, and the changer now works well.