$650K Turntable?
- Thread starter amirm
- Start date
And let me also add my welcome and apology for the earlier tone of this thread given your background of the project. Your English is just fine -- certainly better than Google translation 
. So please, I hope you stay around and discuss these topics with members. I am sure there will be good information for both sides.
. So please, I hope you stay around and discuss these topics with members. I am sure there will be good information for both sides.
of the three issues; drive system, bearing type and arm design.....i'm most locked and loaded on a 'non-belt' platter drive system as most essential for optimal performance. maybe the Caliburn's belt drive system gets the job done at the top of the drive system performance heap (at $150k list price); but other than that my favorite turntables all include direct drive, and next would be idler drive. so far the very best drive system i've heard is in the Rockport Sirius III.
it's very easy to integrate a good quality belt drive system in a turntable. so almost all current turntables use a belt. direct drive systems for moderate to mid priced turntables are typically not very good.....and so most people's impressions of direct drive is negative compared to belt driven one's of the same price range. however; the design limitations of the belt drive approach eventually becomes a limitation to speed stability as turntables and arms get better and better. belts have the rubber band effect to some degree. period. many approaches are taken to minimize this effect with heavy platters, flywheels, multiple motors, isolation, etc. etc. most of those things change the effect but none completely eliminate the issues. then you have groove modualtion too.
direct drive is not easy or cheap to do right. but when it works it takes the musical message to another place.
if you never listen to a great direct drive turntable next to a similar level belt driven turntable you will never understand why direct drive is an advantage. there are many wonderful belt drive turntables out there. this issue is not about good and bad, but on levels of good.
i'm not as picky on bearing types; i've heard very low noise 'hard bearings' of various types, although again i've not heard one as quiet as the air bearing on the Rockport. and designing a great air bearing is very expensive and complicated.
a properly designed linear tracking arm will have this rock solid solidity to the music which pivoting arms cannot quite accomplish. again; you are talking about a very expensive air bearing design and precision construction to be able to attain the advantages of linear tracking while avoiding the pitfalls of 'crabbing' across the record and having low inertia. i think that at the very top of the pivoted arm heap you get an arm equal but different than a linear tracker. it has trade-offs of advantages. so i'm not anti-pivoted arm at all.
All this discussion reminds me of some tests we did in the thread on the demagnetizer where we attempted to determine the difference between two digital recordings of an LP. There was a slow variation in speed between two plays that made impossible to accurately compare the files. The period of variation was far too long to be measured for wow/flutter - but it sure messed up Audio DiffMaker.
Gary,
it's like when we tried your Absolute Fidelity power cords in my system. until i fixed my bass problem the bass distortion covered up subtle advantages to the better cords. i had been very happy with my power cords. all of a sudden they were exposed as distorted.
there are many nice sounding tonearms. most have particular characteristics and we speak about personal taste. then we hear a tonearm with dramatically less distortion and we are hit in the face with the fact that all that 'character' we viewed as a matter of taste was distortion, and lots of it. and it exposes shortcomings in drive systems. our whole 'world view' of cause and effect and reference points gets rocked.
sure; speed variations exposed by your program maybe are not anything we might hear, but i'll bet (actually i know) that were we to put the two tt's side by side those differences would jump right out at us. but how many people get the chance to do that?
Mike, that's the challenge that we all have - you solve one problem, and unveil other problems. Unfortunately, sometimes the problem revealed is larger than the problem just solved, and I think that's the biggest challenge in vinyl playback. Even I am constantly shocked by the amount of difference a power cord makes in a turntable - even one with a regenerating power supply. It should make no difference, but it does - and then it shows up that the tone arm is distorting, or the stylus is "jittering" in the grooves.
A never-ending battle, which may be why so many on this forum prefer digital..... but I still prefer to listen to vinyl over digital any day.
A never-ending battle, which may be why so many on this forum prefer digital..... but I still prefer to listen to vinyl over digital any day.
Balance set up whole system is a kind of art of work, too much money in one point is not for sure in best result, like I use direct drive TT as the driving motor to drive a belt drive TT with a elastic thread, just change the balance weight of the platters and the tension of the thread can make the sound quality change. I wonder to pay $650K can have the same result
tony ma
tony ma
i'll have to strongly disagree with your inference (intended ot not) that somehow vinyl is flawed because it has such an upside as the hardware is optimized thru technical advances and design maturation. it's really that since vinyl is a mechanical process it's like a race car. every year the cars go faster and faster as the competitors find more speed. they need to keep making rules to slow them down. racing is analog. it's real. just because 10 years ago race car designers did not know as much as they do now; but that does not mean that racing was not valid then or worth doing.
and vinyl playback is still pretty damn good even when it is not perfect.....like anything mechanical it can always be a little better. it's exciting to discover that a 60+ year old mechanical format is still discovering improvements. there is an amazing amount of information in those grooves to be discovered.
and some people do prefer a video game to real racing.
Totally agree. more money does not automatically equate to better....and that's not just audio. At the same time, having a bigger budget definitely gives you more options...that's just math. And therefore, all else being equal, if you have a greater budget and choose wisely amongst the greater/wider choice of options, i will say i have found a trend towards more expensive products working better when combined properly within a system.
Agreed. A good friend of mine, who also prefers analog, has several phono cartridges that have different sounds and enjoys all of them, but can not choose which is the better. But I can understand that for people accepting only "one truth" this situation is a nightmare.
At some time I also experienced it - I also had many phono cartridges. But one day I got nervous with this ambiguity and sold all of them but two, that I still keep - but recently I added an extra one
.
i'll have to strongly disagree with your inference (intended ot not) that somehow vinyl is flawed because it has such an upside as the hardware is optimized thru technical advances and design maturation. it's really that since vinyl is a mechanical process it's like a race car. every year the cars go faster and faster as the competitors find more speed. they need to keep making rules to slow them down. racing is analog. it's real. just because 10 years ago race car designers did not know as much as they do now; but that does not mean that racing was not valid then or worth doing.
and vinyl playback is still pretty damn good even when it is not perfect.....like anything mechanical it can always be a little better. it's exciting to discover that a 60+ year old mechanical format is still discovering improvements. there is an amazing amount of information in those grooves to be discovered.
and some people do prefer a video game to real racing.
I'm not saying that vinyl is any more flawed than any other format - including tape and digital. We've had much more time (60+ years) to refine vinyl playback than we've had time to refine digital playback (30+ years). The upside in vinyl playback in recent years has been hardware optimization, the upside in digital in recent years has been in software/firmware optimization.
What I'm trying to get across is that fixing one flaw oftentimes reveals another flaw - which was what you mentioned in the first place.
With vinyl, there is much more variability. Every turntable/tonearm/cartridge combination will perform differently. However, with digital, there is much fewer components that are inter-related. There isn't much one can do to change the drive system inside a CD transport, or to change the lens of the laser to another better lens. With vinyl, there is much more chance that in our urge to tweak (improve) things, one step forwards can be many steps backwards.
I'm sure you've encountered the time when you bought a "better" cartridge, and then realized that it was putting more energy back into the tonearm, and now you've got to improve the tonearm! You're very much further down the road to vinyl playback perfection than most of us here.
And I can understand that for people who must characterize their subjective preferences as "the truth," objective metrics are a nightmare. I once owned more than a dozen guitars. I liked them all, or I wouldn't have owned them. None of them were any version of any truth other than the one that they created themselves. But audio equipment is not a musical instrument. It is not even a recording of a musical instrument. It is hardware designed for the reproduction of recordings of musical instruments.
If there is an audible difference between two components one is further from the truth than the other. I don't know how we get around that.
Tim
I am quoting myself just to explain that by "one truth" I was addressing the type of people who feel they must always have the best, and once they get a new toy all other toys are flawed, and can not accept the coexistence of two different types of sounds - one must always be better than the other. In the good old analog days (although a few of us already had digital watches) disputes between the partisans of the REGA and the Thorens type of turntables were much more exhilarated than our kind debates between digital and analog.
My apologies, amir, for running counter to your last post, but I would just like to throw in here a resounding "hear, hear" to the thrust of Gary's post, and to comment very, very strongly that, most certainly, "retreating" to digital does NOT solve the need to attempt to solve system problems; they are there just as much, the unfortunate thing is that they are more deeply embedded, it is much harder to use intuition and commonsense approaches to locating and resolving areas of weaknesses.
To get back on track, and using "intuition"
, the approach by at least one TT mob in doing belt drive where there are two idler pulleys as well the drive motor pulley around the circumference of the platter, thereby balancing the forces by the belt on the platter and shaft, makes a lot of engineering sense. What are people's thoughts on that?Frank
You get around it in the same way as you do in the world of actual musical instruments. Some poorly designed or made instruments are just not pleasant to listen to; better instruments will sound different but will still be musical, especially in the hands of a competent muso. So your aim is to have your system always be musical. This does not mean hiding detail, or adding sweetening distortion. Our disagreement lies in that my experience and belief is that a competent system is able to extract sufficient musical detail from any recording to be able to dominate residual distortion and noise to the point that the listening always becomes a convincing, realistic experience ...
Frank
This $650K table is not a real product, it is one man's dream and it is a prototype. There is no business and there is none for sale and there may never be one for sale. So what are we discussing now? Do we want to discuss whether any turntable is worth $650K or do we want to talk about how long it will be before we see $650K turntables on the market? I just don't see where there is much to discuss with the OP.
 | Steve Williams Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator |  | Ron Resnick Site Co-Owner | Administrator |  | Julian (The Fixer) Website Build | Marketing Managersing |