A customer of mine recently acquired a new-old-stock (NOS) Sansui SR-929 direct-drive turntable, in original box!

Originally posted December 2015, updated July 2025!

The Sansui SR-929 was the best turntable Sansui ever made, in my opinion. Tim asked me to take this lovely Sansui SR-929 out of the box for the first time and recommission her. Given that she had not been running for over 30 years, this was a great story for both of us.

Features

The SR-929 is a very well-made direct-drive deck with a lovely gloss piano-black chassis and sexy orange indicators. The SR-929 comes with a good built-in tonearm that is not removable and has RCA output jacks on the back, allowing you to use your own cables. The decks even have a good-quality Audio Technica cartridge, pre-installed.

From the Sansui literature:

“Sansui is proud to contribute to the advancement of state-of-the-art turntable technology with the introduction of the remarkable SR-929.

It’s newly developed quartz direct drive servo system represents a significant Sansui engineering breakthrough in keeping with our policy as a high fidelity only manufacturer to bring you the finest in musical reproduction.

At last, within reach of ordinary music fans and audio buffs, there is now a turntable so accurate and so precise that it exceeds even the strictest professional standards of performance.

Not only is it’s speed very close to absolutely perfect, it’s generated noise in relation to the audio signal is, in practice, immeasurable.

Platter rotation constancy is amazing, with a deviation of less than 0.002% – that’s less than 2 revolutions out of 100,000!

And speed is unaffected by load changes, temperature changes, power voltage/frequency fluctuations and ageing.

Sansui combines the latest quartz crystal accuracy with advance electronic servo circuits to achieve this in the SR929.

The Sansui SR929 is the ultimate in direct-drive turntable perfection.”

These statements are quite hyperbolic, typical of the literature at the time, and the SR-929 is certainly far from the ultimate direct drive turntable, but it is a very decent one.

As always, The Vintage Knob has more great information and details here.

Sansui SR-929 Specifications

Courtesy of The Vinyl Engine

Type: two-speed, quartz-servo, direct-drive, manual turntable

Motor: 20-pole, 30-slot DC brushless type with built-in frequency generator

Drive system: direct spindle drive, quartz servo controlled

Platter: 302mm, 1.4kg, aluminium die-cast

Wow and flutter: less than 0.028% WRMS

Signal to noise ratio: better than 66dB

Speeds: 33 and 45rpm

Fine speed adjustment: +-3.5%

Tonearm: statically balanced, s-shaped tonearm

Effective length: 240mm

Overhang: 15.6mm

Cartridge weight range: 2 to 11g (11 to 21g with sub-weight)

Dimensions: 490 x 173 x 381mm

Weight: 17.1kg

Commission

Decks like this Sansui in NOS condition are virtually unobtainable now, so for my customer to find this SR-929 and for the owner to be willing to ship her to Australia was quite an achievement. This particular deck came from its original American owner, so it was still configured for 120V. The first thing I did was to change the mains voltage input selector to 240V. I then put her on my variac and slowly brought her up to voltage, over about 2 hours.

A variac is a variable mains transformer, allowing an input voltage of, in this case, 240V and an output voltage of anything from 0 – 300V. It is very important to use a variac to run an old piece of gear like this that has not been connected to the mains for a very long time. This allows for the reformation of old electrolytic capacitors in a gradual process of voltage increase over time. This method effectively brings them back to life in most cases.

I’ve documented the unboxing process and tried to get some good detail shots, because these decks are rare, especially in almost perfect condition, as this one is in. There are a couple of imperfections: the tonearm rest has broken at some point, apparently prior to shipping.

This does raise the questions of whether or not this truly is NOS, or just OS in very good condition. In my view, the lack of surface imperfections and completely original packaging leads me to think that it is NOS, or very close to it. Either way, my customer Tim has done a great job in finding this gorgeous old deck 🙂

Summary

As always, I hope you enjoyed this article. Don’t hesistate to let me know if youd like me to work on your Sansui SR-929, or any other direct drive turntable. Feel free to contact us with any questions.