The Origin Live Calypso serves as a vivid reminder of just how simple life has become since we adopted digital sources.
With a CD player, all one needs to do is take the thing out of the box, plug it in, slip a disc into a slot or drawer, push a button, and bingo - one has music. Life with the Calypso (or any other sophisticated record player for that matter) is a different ball game altogether.
Setting up the turntable isn't difficult or especially laborious, although we reckon it'll probably take you longer than the 15 minutes suggested by the instructions, particularly if this is your first venture into turntable set-up.
And, as we discovered, set-up is crucial if you want to hear this deck perform at its best. Get it right and you'll be as happy as a pig in muck; get it wrong and you'll need to take the porker out of the equation.
The Calypso is a skeletal design without the complexities of a sprung sub-chassis. That said, once you've assembled it, levelled it, topped up its bearing with oil, fitted its tonearm and dressed the arm cable through the P-clip, you'll have to fiddle with the positioning of its separate motor pod and attach the round-section drive belt, which can be tricky till you acquire the knack.
Once you've reached this stage, all that's left is to fine-tune the adjustment of your arm and cartridge and leave the deck running for a while to allow all its mechanical bits and pieces to bed in, and its circuitry to do whatever circuitry does during the early hours of its working life.
Origin Live thoughtfully supplies a specially modified phono lead so that you can burn in your tonearm's wiring by feeding the output of a CD player through it. You need to do exactly what the instructions tell you and route the tonearm cable to a line-level input before you attempt the process - we certainly won't be held responsible for the outcome if you don't.
You might also like to check the rotational speed of the deck once you've settled on the correct motor-pod position - the one that puts the drive belt at the correct tension.
