Buying a new TT today

Let’s not keep hyping the great vintage tables and cartridges so much. It just pushes the prices higher for us. Best to just not argue with people so much and let them buy their cheap belt drives and let them find their path to better sound on their own.

@sokogear          

The post said $2000 on a belt drive. I use a garrard 301, a couple direct drives and a belt drive. A Kuzma Reference. It’s a decent belt drive. I’m not against belt drives.  I just think that for $2k there are better choices than a new belt drive in this price catagory. 


The mm vs mc debate. I’m quite new to vintage mm. I have four arms mounted at once and have spent time comparing. I’m not going to say that one is better than the other, but I’m blown away by dollar for dollar vintage mm is the clear winner. Yesterday I listened to my $2k dynavector xx2 and an NOS  Stanton 881s. I paid $300 for the Stanton. This isn’t the totl Stanton either. It sounded awesome!

@chakster 

Relating to the Doug Sax article. I recently got into vintage reel to reel. A 4 track revox B77. A record dealer friend found me 25 7.5 ips tapes. Mostly jazz from the 50’s and early 60’s. I listened almost exclusively to these tapes for a couple weeks. Going back to my mc cartridges there was a distinctly different presentation. But switching to mm (881s) it was much closer.  Most noticeable was guitar and piano. MM and even better, tape,  gives a fuller, more weighted sound similar to when I hear my guitar and piano in the house. My mc cartridges are all of the more full bodied sound too. But I have to say piano from some of these tapes was the  closest to the piano downstairs that I’ve ever heard in my room. But not in the audiophile sense. The tapes don’t have the frequency extension, soundstage, and air. But wait. Neither does my piano. Or my original 1962 Stratocaster through my  assorted Fender amps.