Considering selling my restored Garrard 301

@famoej 

That should be no problem and you will increase your signal to noise ratio. ID turntables were a necessity in the past because there was no other way to adjust the speed of the platter. All motors were AC and clocked the mains frequency. Then the AR XA came out and blew everybody's minds. A dirt cheap turntable that out performed all those ID tables. I owned a TD 124 a combination belt ID table with an SME arm and even without antiskating the AR XA was seriously quieter. People will tell you that if you upgrade these old turntables you can make them quieter and you can for a short period, but the rubber idler wheel develops flat spots quickly and the rumble starts and gets slowly worse. The other problem is every bearing makes noise, some less than others, but they all make noise. The more bearings you have the more noise you make and ID tables have two unnecessary bearings. With idler wear and multiple bearings you have a rumble machine. This is the reason belt and direct drives stole the entire market dumping these old ID drive tables, which were in the beginning very inexpensive until audiophile mythology took over. If you go to any modern belt or direct drive turntable with an isolation suspension built in or added you will notice a very significant drop in noise. Whether or not you can cover the expense by selling the Garrard depends on which turntable you are looking at. It is not going to cover an SME, Avid, Basis or Dohmann, but it might cover a Sota Sapphire which you can upgrade later with the new motor and drive. It does not matter what you do with a plinth for the Garrard. There is no idler wheel turntable that will outperform a Sapphire as it ages (that statement is going to be.....very popular :-) But, if I spend a billion dollars on a plinth, new bearing and idler wheel..... You still have a turntable with too many bearings and an idler wheel that develops noise almost immediately. Why do you think ID turntables almost became extinct? Why are there not any modern ID turntables with one or two exceptions. Are you telling me that Dohmann, Basis, SME, TechDAS and Technics could not build an ID turntable if they are so much better? Old ID turntables can make wonderful music, but they are noisy which is one of the main reasons many old preamps had rumble filters. With the advent of boosted subwoofers and digital filters rumble filters are becoming popular again. 

Now I am going to get ripped into tiny pieces. 

@fsonicsmith 

Thank you for the compliment. I am dyslexic probably from a head injury when I was 5 years old. My spelling and punctuation are still pretty bad, but I do OK considering. 

I download high resolution files to an SSD and the best of them are superior to any analog including 15 ips analog tape. I also have a very large record collection started in 1958. Playing records for me is more natural than shifting a car. I have never owned an automatic car, only pickup trucks and my first two were also manuals. My right arm is my automatic transmission and record cuing device. 

Mark Dohmann, who makes what I believe to be the finest turntable available has said that if you can not afford his table buy a Sota. The Cosmos with its inverted suspension, magnetic thrust bearing, and Eclipse belt drive is so much quieter and accurate than any idler wheel drive turntable one has to wonder why on this earth anyone would buy an old idler wheel table. I could understand when they were dirt cheap, but now? Boggles the mind. 

@lewm 

In an idler wheel table the stepped pully drives the idler wheel, the idler wheel has a bearing, the idler wheel bears on the platter. That is actually 3 points of solid contact. The TD 124 has the same three points plus a belt.  In a belt drive there are no points of solid contact. Belts do not generate noise, they generate wow and flutter when they wear. The Eclipse drive ramps up slowly so the belt does not wear out as fast. I change it when I start to see a rise in wow and flutter. I have a spare belt for the Cosmos, but I have not used it yet in over a year. A good idler wheel table can be relatively quiet when new but they deteriorate rapidly mostly from idler wheel wear then they become rumble generating machines. Wow and flutter also suffers. The more interesting comparison I think is with direct drive tables. I have been trained to avoid direct drives because of the poor performance of the early units. Occasionally I get the urge to try a modern unit, but you know how I feel about suspensions and there is only one direct drive table I know of that is suspended. Otherwise, you would have to buy an isolation platform in addition. I also an enamored by vacuum clamping and there is not one DD tables that I am aware of that has it. I do not even know of a DD table that has reflex clamping although you can add it.

As an aside, I have a friend who is a CS Port dealer. He has the CS port table with a Kusma Sapphire arm on it. It had to have a custom mounting plate for the arm which is a bit weird because the platter is 13" in diameter and the Sapphire is short. Anyway, it has a huge very heavy record weight and it does not use a mat. Then It looked to me that the platter was not flat. I put a straight edge across it an low an behold the platter surface was concave with the center about 3 mm down (1mm for the label) The weight pushes the record into the concave surface of the platter with as much clamping force as a reflex clamp without adding stress on the center of the record. Very clever. I wonder how that effects azimuth.