AF turntables are not meant to cater to the people who highly value introduced harmonic colorations. Sure these colorations become integrated in the brain as things such as warmth or for Peter "ambient information" around instruments. For most this is what they have come to love about vinyl playback. It isn't that the AF tables have none of their own. As said choice of upper platter (Steel, Duralumin, Ti) change the sound. It is just that they are reduced over the spectrum more than most if not all others on the market. There is a tradeoff here. Since table borne vibrations eat up a larger portion of the potential cartridge output, you get a form of compression and a loss in dynamic range. Strip the noise down and more of the dynamic potential is returned to the user for deployment. This however also strips away what one might go as far as associate with LP sound. In my case, years with the AF1 and its siblings has redefined what LP sound should be in terms of what is possible with ambient cues, spatial projection and dynamic contrast, admittedly in systems with full real use, effortless, frequency range beyond 20kHz-20Hz. To re-inject some harmonic coloration to taste, a change in the combinations of arms, carts and upper platters, gets me close enough without going too far back into compression or dynamic repression.
It always trips me out when people bitch about stereo systems not having the dynamics of live but continuously knock products that give you dynamics at the source. No increase in speaker sensitivity or brute current, wherever you live in audiophile land, can restore the dynamic range attributes lost at the cart coils. Less than .5mv of potential for the majority of audiophile vinyl listeners. Think about it.
If the perceived dynamics is too much, that is on the end user and the person doing his setup for him, assuming the user has not bothered to learn how to drive his own car. Damping can more easily be done through gain staging and in my opinion is the place where it should be done. My analogy would be the use of a fuel plate restrictor to drop the power rather than changing the entire engine to a less powerful one.