EMT 929 tonearm for my EMT 930 turntable

My turntable was received last year in pieces (fortunatelly with a fresh coat of paint done professionally by Dusch) so i had to learn everything on the fly.

Recently i got the proper EMT 929 tonearm with its respective cable so i tried to make heads and tails of how the wires are connected, which pin is which, and how to wire the external connectors on my connection panel on the back of my EMT.

Currently the 7 pin cable is connected to the big connector with 16 pins that is used by the EMT 139st preamplifier and since i don’t have it, i reused some pins to change a bit the original pinout.

The EMT designers decided to join the wires for left – right – and shielding (wires 1, 7 and shielding) in pin 1a. Pin 1b is connected to the white wire from 6 (right +) respectively 2a brown from 2(left +).

There was a bit of confusion for me since I was used with the SME standard of red (right +), green (right -), white (left +) and blue (left -) plus eventually shielding. The purpose of this post is to shed some light of the differences and keep it as a reference for myself for the future. Btw, guess what, the new EMT 929 tonearm uses “standard” red/white/green/blue wires…

Anyways, as a conclusion, according to schematics we have the 7 pin connector pinout as following

1 – yellow wire (from blue cartridge wire) is left –
2 – brown wire (from white cartridge wire) is left +
3
4 – GND
5
6 – white wire (from red cartridge wire) is right +
7 – green wire (from green cartridge wire) is right –

Seen from the cartridge side, the EMT standard headshell connector has the following pinout:
1 – red goes to pin 6 in the tonearm connector
2 – white – goes to pin 2
3 – green – goes to pin 7
4 – blue – goes to pin 1

We can actually see in the schematics that 1+2 = left channel and 6+7 = right channel. Lovely.

As i mentioned earlier, the powers that be decided to join the COLD (-) wires to the shielding into pin number 1a. I am sure it was a thorough decision back then but with the dual mono and/or balanced preamps these days, it’s difficult to imagine what were the reasons.

So, to summarize, we have the following pinout in the big 16 pin connector to be used by EMT 139st preamp:

1b – white – red + (otherwise known as red hot)

2a – brown – left + (otherwise known as left hot)

1a – yellow + green + shelding (left -, right -, shielding). Why ?

3a is GND and 3b is signal wire, used by headphones

Most likely i will not have an EMT 139st preamp, ever, so i will solder directly the tonearm cable directly on the back of my turntable, to the connectors (i have XLR and RCA). In the near future i will change it with a nice CARDAS 5 pin connector to simplify things a bit.

Anyways, i hope it will be useful to someone as it was fun for me to discover everything.