Well, I’d have to say this went well, and was done on a budget. The SM20 unit only cost me ยฃ40 but it was a bit rusty, and did not have the full set of attachments.ย Over the last couple of days I’ve rust-doctored it, took as much of the rust as I could off with wire wool, then finished with fine sandpaper.ย It came up better than I thought – the left side is worse than the right (the seller had it stood on one side in the corner of the garage for a long time), but where I have it, you can’t really see much of the left side.
Although it wasn’t built for my Beocenter 8500 and Beogram 8500, it suits it pretty well, and the 4 brackets that came with it were enough – 2 for each.ย The two brackets for the turntable are only 18cm long which does make me nervous – it does sit well and it is dead level, but just in case I’ve put some double-sided foam tape underneath.ย the advantage of those short brackets though it that they are invisible – the turntable seems to float there.
I bought some little hooks from Amazon (intended to hang over your kitchen cupboard doors, to hang your tea-towels on!), but they happen to fit and have a nice steel finish, so I’ve added 6 of those to hold the ‘now playing’ vinyl, CD, and cassette, which you can see on the photos.ย It looks a bit busy though so I’m going to take the cassette ones off – I don’t really play cassettes after all.
On the left, under the turntable, I made a makeshift bracket of my own using some metal fittings from a local hardware store bought for a couple of pounds – there’s no weight in the WIIM Pro streamer I have put there, so it works pretty well.ย ย The Philips Hue lamp under that sets it all off quite well too!
There’s quite a lot of wiring at the back.ย I have MCL cables connected to the speaker outputs (in turn connected to a pair of CX50s) powerlink connected to my Beolab 6000s, an FM antenna, and all three DIN inputs are in use, but SM20 hides all of that.
I’ve connected a long audio aux link cable to the aux connection, which snakes around the room, connects to a Beolink Converter 1611, from which there is a masterlink cable leading to nothing at all right now, but I pick my Beolab 3500 up on Monday (bought on eBay), then that goes on the wall.
I’ve also only just found out that I can set my WIIM Pro as the ‘default music speaker’ for my google home display, so now I can just voice command google to play thinks on Spotify, and it plays on my Beocenter through the WIIM Pro.
So now I have all of the music.ย All of it.
