As much as it was exciting to see Technics unveil a followup to its legendary SL-1200 turntable, there is the small issue of its price. Priced at £3,000/$4,000, the new SL-1200G will cost far more than the original SL-1200MK2, which was just £400 before it was discontinued in 2010. And if you're a DJ that needs two of them for cutting, scratching, and mixing, you may need to sell a kidney first.
Paying a premium for audio equipment certainly isn't unheard of in audiophile circles—see the £300 Ethernet cable—but Technics has been taking some flak for the SL-1200G's high price, particularly as it doesn't boast things like a "monofilament" bearing system, or a "low resonance sandwich construction." Speaking to What Hi-Fi, Technics CTO Tetsuya Itani claimed that because the SL-1200G was a complete redesign—requiring a new manufacturing process and new tools—the price had to go up.
"Because the original 1210 turntables were manufactured for so many years, the manufacturing process had got to a very low cost. Now we need to invest in all the tools again, and the price now is much higher than the 1970s," Itani explained. "We began to study just a few months prior to IFA, maybe summer 2014, for the new SL-1200. We learned that it was impossible [to make the same deck], as almost all the tools for manufacturing were gone or heavily damaged—only one die remained, and that was for the dust cover."
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