Generally, I agree. It's a personal choice and very much dependent on circumstances. I have a friend who has heavily modified his Planar3 and I have advised against it the whole way. Many buyers do not like modded stuff and you don't get back the money you put in. Also, a deck like the Planer 3 has a performance ceiling so mods can only do so much. Yes, his deck sounds better than it did but it doesn't sound like an LP12 and if you add up the money dropped on the mods he could've bought one. But he asked about the different mods, I gave him honest advice but I'm not his mother!
As far as stripping the paint goes, again it's down to circumstances. Would I do it to a brand new 808? Probably not but I've done it to old RB300s which are a lot less valuable. Basically, I was prepared to accept that I might loose the full value of the arm, I didn't care about resale. I still don't. One of those arms is upstairs in a box. I haven't used it in years but I'm in no hurry to sell it because I know how good it is.
I just rebuilt an LP12 for a friend with some Stack Audio parts. He collected it last night and we were comparing his deck to mine. His has an RB300 I stripped and is Audio Origami rewired. Mine has an RB3000. The decks are not the same spec but I know both well, his deck used to be mine. Bottom line, the stripped RB300 is stunning. I don't know if it's as good as the RB3000 but it's in the ballpark and sounded just as good last night.
I knew how good they were years ago. I went from an Ittok to a stripped and rewired RB300 and I've never considered owning a Linn arm again. Say £160 for a nice RB300, £130 for Audio Origami to rewire it and stripping the paint is a DIY job. So for about £300 you've got a medium mass arm which mixes it with used arms costing three times the price. It's certainly good enough to deal with any MC cart you want to use and not hold the deck back.
Now that you point it out it's obvious! ;0) If you look closely there are a lot of differences between the original and current tubes. One of my concerns is that they might be getting too obsessed with weight reduction. If you look at the headshell you'll see that it's thinned down and, importantly, they've made the join between the headshell and the body even less substantial than it was. I can't help but think this is a mistake. Over the years several people have identified this area as weakness, on the original arm! And they've made it even thinner?
