Denon-DP67L

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Denon DP67L turntable
Moerch DP6 tone-arm, My Sonic Lab Eminent EX cartridge
My workshop vinyl set-up.
Copyright 2018 © Troels Gravesen

Recently acquired, this Denon DP67L is meant to be my workshop vinyl workhorse. No external motors, belts, etc. Fast start-up and fast stop. The DP67 has it. The risk of purchasing such a piece of complicated electronics is that if something goes, you better find your way to the local dumpster for electronics. Sending this to service is likely to cost as much as the turntable itself.
The DP67L comes with an elaborate tone-arm with electronic lift, electronic damping and anti-skating. Pulling off the bottom panel I couldn't believe the amount of electronics and special widgets going into making this all work. Actually I had expected a single compact platter/motor assembly which could just simply be pulled off and placed into another plinth. Not so!
Fortunately I had a complete manual and could identify the various circuit boards and what they were doing. Thus, I started soldering and cutting wires, a lot of wires, while checking the basic platter kept spinning - and so it did. I guess the red encircled components could all be removed without jeopardizing the basic function of the deck. Obviously the electronic lift was gone, but you can't have it all.
The turntable also had a nice and unbroken plastic cover, which was another requirement for a workshop turntable as dust is less than ideal for vinyl playback.

As-is I mounted a vdh Canary cartridge and put on a record. Not bad, but also not exactly what I had expected. I guess the tone-arm is much too heavy for the Canary. So, after removing the tone-arm and drilling a 20 mm hole the Moerch DP6/vdh-Canary was installed and things started moving the right direction, in fact it sounded really really well, not least thanks to the vdh The Grail phono-stage, which has been on the shelf since purchase of the EAR-912 pre-amp.

The plinth was made from four layers of 20 mm Baltic birch with 4 mm bitumen pad in-between.

No drawings or templates available.

2020:
The vdh Colibri was replaced by MY Sonic Lab EMINENT EX cartridge, a wonderful combination with the DP6 tonearm and likely to stay so for a long time to come.
Most of the time I use the modded phono-stage/line-stage from my EAR-868PL preamplifier. I'm very very pleased with the overall performance of this system.

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On the right hand image you see a quick set-up for my Moerch DP6 tone-arm. Not nice, but it works until the whole thing sees a new plinth.

Left: More testing revealed the board encircled in green had to stay for maintaining speed control. Hmm.. Need to find some space for this in the new plinth. Right: All boards placed within the frame of the platter.