Hi, as I mentioned in an older thread, I've taken on trying to get my parents' 35 year-old Dual 1210 back into game shape. This weekend I took it into a shop to get looked at and they cleaned it, tested it and put a Grado Black cartridge on. Sounded pretty good in the store so I took it home and tested it out on my very modest (read: non-existant) vinyl collection. It played a 25-year old copy of REM's Murmur alright, a little skip here or there, but sounded alright. Same with the 7"s I had. So I went out and bought a brand new LP and tried spinning that - side A played fine, side B skipped all the way through, usually at around the same point in the LP's rotation. There was nothing visually wrong with the disc at all and it played fine when I brought it back to the store, so evidently it's my deck. I've pretty much decided that I'm going to seek out a new (used) turntable and transfer the new cartridge over to it, but I'm curious as to what it is that is causing the Dual to not track the new LP. The counterweight and all that stuff seems to be set up alright and as I mentioned, it played the old LP alright. Any thoughts?
My guess would be a cable that got twisted underneath the platen or possibly the tone arm did get out of adjustment on the way home. Both things could easily happen if you didn't tie down the platter and platen when transporting the table. Other than that I would give the repair shop a call and ask their opinion.